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Any fruit in syrup can be preserved in alcohol and not need refrigeration. The important thing to work out is the percentage of alcohol by volume as this must be kept above 19% to prevent fermentation. What you will end up with is a small amount of fruit in liqueur. Starting with 500 ml of Brandy at 37%, gives 185 ml of alcohol. 1L of product (500mL fruit in syrup and 500mL alcohol) would give 18.5%, 900ml would give 20.5% alcohol by volume so to cover for atmospheric factors add 400 ml of fruit and syrup to 500 ml of spirit (rum, brandy, vodka, scotch).

The balance of the finished product will be affected by the balance of sugar to alcohol. With sweet fruit work on 185g of sugar in your 400 ml of syrup. More fruit can be added and less sugar if the fruit is extra sweet. I start with equal weight of fruit to sugar giving a slightly higher sugar content, so mix 200 g of fruit to 185g to 200g of sugar, leave for 24 hours to liquefy – if no liquid (a dry type fruit) add a scant amount of water and heat gently (while stirring) to above 70 degrees Celsius for 15 minutes to sterilize the syrup and liquefy the sugar. When the syrup is cool blend 400ml of fruit in syrup with the spirits, bottle and place in a dark storage space and allow to mature. The more years you leave the product the thicker it will get.

The same can effectively be done by adding dried fruit to spirit. At a guess I would add 400 g of dried fruit to the alcohol and allow to rest in a sealed jar for 12 months or longer. The longer this is kept the fruit will absorb almost all of the liquid and you will end up with a very alcoholic fruit mince for cakes. I used to keep mixed dried fruit in rum in a jar to add to cooking, just adding a spoon or two, or three to cooking as needed. With all of these the true test and trick is to mature them for at least 12 months.

Authored by: 

John King of Rainforest Liqueurs – http://www.rainforestliqueurs.com.au/

Sourced from: 

Sub-Tropical Fruit Club of Qld newsletter June July 2002

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Tino: I’ve been in the area since 1950 growing grapes – some of you from around here will remember that Richlands was a big grape-growing area in the 50’s 60’s & 70’s. The main varieties grown were the Black Hamburg and Cloach. They have now fallen out of favour and we took up new varieties in the 80’s. Grapes will grow in a wide range of soils from sandy loams to the heavier soils. They need two things – a reasonable winter – the colder the better – and good drainage. If you grow them around your house, I’d recommend the northern aspect because they need full sun for good results. We have 12 varieties here and a few wine grapes for our own use. Some varieties we have are Cardinals, White & Black Muscat, and Maroo Seedless. We chopped out the Menindee Seedless because we couldn’t get them to bear in this area – they tasted like apples but people liked them.

We graft onto our own rootstock here though grapes will grow on their own roots. You can just plant a cutting but it depends on the area. If you have red soil or you’re inland, they would probably grow quite well on their own roots. It’s really the nematodes that knock them around. We had no success with that here, so we graft them. There are a large number of rootstocks available (check with the DPI). On our farm we’ve experimented with about 15 and the best was called SO4. They’ve changed its name to Telechi 5C. That’s the rootstock we use. It’s vigorous, but not too vigorous, and we have good results, finding it compatible with most varieties. Some rootstock is not compatible with particular varieties. Ramsay, a very vigorous rootstock, is one to watch. It wasn’t compatible with some of the varieties. You’d put it in and they would grow for a year or two then die. So, rootstocks are very important.

The most critical part of the growing is the controlling both Downy and Powdery Mildews. To control them you use Copper and Sulphur. There are a wide variety of Coppers – Copper Oxychloride or Mancozeb and Wettable Sulphur. In the old days we used Bordeaux Mixture, which was copper and lime mixed together. It was probably the best ever. It was rain resistant. It did take some effort to mix and it is not compatible with a lot of other sprays. Rather than keep spraying with Rogor or Lebacyd for the fruit fly we use an attractant that we spray – we trickle it on every 4^th row. We mix an insecticide with the attractant that draws the fruit flies to it. They eat it and it’s the end of them. We spray it once before the grapes ripen, then every seven days after that. That has given us good control over the fruit fly. You have to spray for Mildews especially in a wet year. If you don’t get any grapes, it’s because you have mildew. Work is being done to develop Mildew resistant varieties – one of them is Chamboucin. It’s a wine grape. I’m experimenting with them, and they seem to be quite clean and don’t get Mildew. Another important thing with grapes is fertilising – we use Nitrophoska – have a look at your growth – if you’re getting good growth, then you don’t need too much fertiliser. Apply it sparingly.

Member: Which is the best mildew-resistant variety?

Tino: Probably Isabella and Chamboucin.

Tino: We had to net all the vines last year because of birds.

Sheryl: What are the water requirements for grapes?

Tino: We’re not geared to water – we have a bore and we put a bit of water on if it’s really dry but they do quite well without water. I must stress that we cultivate our soil. DPI will tell you that’s not the way to go – they’ll say grass it and keep it clean on the side and that’s OK if you have plenty of water to give them. To cultivate, we use a Triple-K cultivator once we’ve cleaned out the off-seasons undergrowth. That normally digs down about 10cm and it keeps the soil loose, forming a buffer from the hot sun and preventing moisture being drawn out from underneath.

Bruce: For those of you who don’t understand, you may wonder why that’s working. If you don’t cultivate, the grape will have its roots near the surface, in the top few inches.  Then when it becomes really dry, the grape becomes too dependent on those surface roots. It will dry out. Whereas, what Tino is doing is effectively creating a kind of mulch. By disturbing the surface soil each time, and cutting out roots that crept towards the surface, the grape doesn’t become dependant on surface moisture. In the summer the surface will dry out, but there is water that will stay down lower. He’s altered the soil structure so it doesn’t actually act with a capillary action, sucking water up from deep below and allowing it to evaporate.

Tino: We’ve dug holes 1m deep and you couldn’t get the dirt up with the shovel because it gets so powdery deep down. If you don’t cultivate and keep that buffer between the moisture under the ground and the sun, it will dry out.

Sheryl: How do you know when to start irrigating – when the leaf starts wilting?

Tino: If you wait until that, you may as well forget it!

Sheryl: What do you use as an attractant for Fruit Flies and what do you add to it?

Tino: We use Q Fly Lure. It tells you what to use with it.  We use it with Lorsban.

George: How often do you put it on?

Tino: We put it on before the grapes ripen – about every 7 days – we trickle it on top of the leaf cover. It doesn’t go anywhere near the fruit – that’s the beauty of it.

Sheryl: What time of the year do you fertilise?

Tino: We fertilise after they shoot, and we use Potassium Sulphate as well when the berries have formed

Sheryl: How much do you use?

Tino: Use it sparingly.

Bob: What nets do you use?

Tino: We use cotton/nylon – they’re very good. We started off with plastic that was supposedly biodegradable. We use rolls of 5m by 150m. You could try buying them from Growforce, although you can only buy them in bulk. They will keep the silvereyes out, and you should get 20 years of use out of them. We made up an attachment to put them on and take them off.  It’s a bit of a contraption that goes behind the tractor and makes the net go through some loops. It requires 3 people to manage netting – one driving, and two walking behind to put them on. It is the same when taking them off.

Bob: What happens when the vine grows through the net?

Tino: We only put them on just before they ripen. To free the vines, we slip a 1 inch water hose under the net, and, one on each side of the row, my brother and I, walk along every row. We do this every 3 weeks or so and it flicks the nets up. Don’t leave them on too long or the new shoots will go through the netting.  The first couple of years when we had finished with the nets, we tried to roll them up but that was not successful so we coded each patch of grapes and we bag the net in coded bags ready for next years use. 

Tino: When pruning, the idea is that the shoots you leave this year are on last year’s wood – all grape-bearing shoots have to be on that wood.  The problem is that if you cut back and it’s not on last year’s wood, the fruit won’t form. One other important thing is to always keep the vine coming back. 

Peter: There’s a fair amount of energy stored in the wood as well as the roots so why don’t grape growers leave a fair amount of wood there?

Tino: We could leave an enormous amount of wood and we’d get an enormous amount of grapes but they wouldn’t be first quality grapes  A typical example would be Black Muscat – you can get a box of grapes on a vine of this type, but the colour wouldn’t be black, it would be wishy-washy and the taste wouldn’t be there.  We work on 3-5kgs per vine and this gives good quality fruit, as the nutrients go into your existing bunches of grapes. There are 2 ways of pruning. Spur and rod pruning – when you’re pruning you have to think 3 years ahead. With the Black Muscat on our farm, no grapes will come out on the spurs – only the rods will bear. The difference between a rod and a spur is – a rod is a long cane of 8 to 10 buds; and a spur has only two buds.

Sheryl: Do you prune every variety the same?

Tino: No. Merbane I prune differently. Wine grapes I also prune differently – instead of one rod, I’ve been leaving two. The spacing between vines is 1½ metres. We don’t irrigate. When pruning, I only leave 2 rods – one each side.

Sheryl: With North to South and East to West directions, do you have different varieties going East to West as opposed to North to South?  

Tino: If you get a really hot summer then East to West would be an advantage because grapes do burn. Planted East to West they are shaded underneath. If they are planted North to South they can cook on a hot sunny afternoon. We have Black Muscats going East to West and there’s not a lot of difference between those, but in a backyard situation, you’d plant them on the Northern aspect of the house. That is, the trellis would run East to West. We graft all varieties just below ground.  We only grow table grapes commercially, and I dabble in a bit of wine grapes for my own use.

Sheryl: They’ve got a higher sugar content haven’t they?

Tino: The only way to get the sugar into them is not to overload your vine with berries, and if you get a reasonable season allow them to fully ripen. The only reason you can’t get decent grapes at the market is because it’s a falling market and the grower tries to earn as much as he can. So if it looks good, he picks it early. If you can’t eat it, you shouldn’t be picking it and the reason we have a bit of a following here is the very reason that they taste good.

Bruce: I can vouch for Tino’s Muscat grapes making a dry wine you get 14% alcohol – plenty of sugar in them.

Bob: My father knew somebody who used to plant the wild rootstock, and then he’d dig down underneath the ground and graft it then cover it over with newspaper and soil and keep it damp.

Member: That was before they had tape.

Peter: Are the rootstocks you use resistant to phylloxera?

Tino: All rootstocks released by the DPI are phylloxera resistant. There was a small area on the other side of the river with phylloxera but we’ve never had it here. We put in a cover crop, Sudex. It grows right up over the posts. We slash it twice and it puts mulch back into the ground and stops the soil wash. Also, if you get the heavier rains earlier in the year, it helps to drain the soil. We plant it after we finish taking off the crop in late January. Drainage is a most important thing.  We’ve had some problems. We found that if you over-fertilise they grow too lush, and they tend to split. We found that by getting them to grow hardier, they’ll stand up better to all conditions. Cardinal will split but the Muscat should be fairly split resistant.

Member: I have Black Opal, and if I get heavy dew in late April, they split.

Tino: They’ve changed its name to Black Maroo – we have 6 rows of those.

Sheryl: Why do you graft below ground?

Tino: Our soil was originally more acid than is ideal for growing grapes. In the early days we added dolomite annually to correct the acidity. Now that the pH (a measure of acidity/alkalinity) is up to about 6.5 (almost neutral), we haven’t applied dolomite for some years. Grapes will grow if the pH is between 5.5 and 6.0. For many years we applied dolomite at a rate of 10 to 15 tons per acre. We used dolomite rather than lime because first, it includes magnesium as well as calcium; and second its action on the soil and soil microorganisms is gentler than lime. Most organic gardeners prefer dolomite to lime.

Article compiled by Sheryl Backhouse

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For Apricots, Pears, Plums and Peaches – mince and add sodium or potassium metabisulphite from the chemist.  For 12 lb of fruit, wash and remove the stones/seeds and other waste then mince into a paste.  Add ¼ oz or about a teaspoon of the sodium or potassium metabisulphite, stirring in well to give it an even distribution through the mixed pulp.

Spread on drying trays or plastic sheets and place in the sun. Each strip should be ½ to ¾ inch thick and six inches wide. Use a pot scraper to spread food evenly and square edges. Leave in the sun at least a day to fix colour. After that, drying can be completed in sun or shade. After 3 days, turn the strips to hasten drying. When dry, roll into strips and store in airtight containers.

You can catch up with Chester Dott from Forbidden Fruits Nursery Mullumbimby at one of the markets in northern NSW:

1^st Sunday Byron Bay;    2^nd Sunday The Channon;    3^rd Saturday Bellingen;    4^th Sunday Bangalow

Ring for a copy of his list or email: forbiddenfruits@optusnet.com.au for a copy.

Sourced from: 

STFC Newsletter February – March 2006

Date sourced: 

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So our local newspaper proclaims! Tequila is an alcoholic beverage prepared from the leafless cores of various types of agave in statutorily-defined areas of Mexico, where it is a native plant.  One USA botanical source lists over 1350 recorded names of species of agave, but the preferred species for top-quality tequila is the blue agave – Agave tequilana Weber (blue variety).  Even then, this particular agave has many subspecies and varieties. 

There are four main types of tequila, with varying percentages of alcohol.  Some may have involved the addition of non-agave sugars, colourings or flavourings such as caramel, and have been subjected to different periods and methods of aging.  The acknowledged best and clearest, but most expensive, white or “blanco” tequila, is aged for the least time – less than 60 days. Whether it or cheaper types will be the “new vodka” remains to be seen.

Tequila is familiar to drinkers in bars round the world as the basis of margaritas. Margaritas consist of white tequila, mixed with an orange liqueur such as Triple Sec, Cointreau or Grand Marnier, and lime juice (preferably from fresh limes). The rim of the glass can be moistened with lime juice and then dipped in salt.  A lime wedge set across the rim completes the presentation.  However, tequila does not contain the well-publicised preserved worm inside the bottle – this is found in a similar product called Mezcal, which is prepared from one or more other types of agave, to which is often added a preserved larva of one of at least two insect species found within the plant. Tequila and vodka are sometimes combined in cocktails, but which will be most popular and affordable in the long term remains to be seen. The traditional preparation of tequila did not include distillation, so the usual alcohol content was only 5%-7% or so.  However, when the Spanish Conquistadores arrived in Mexico, far from their ready supplies of familiar liquors, they introduced distillation and so a much stronger spirit could be produced. The Mexican legal limit to alcohol in tequila is 38%-55% but the lower end of this range is most common. Production is labour-intensive at times during the 8-12 years it takes the blue agave to approach maturity.  Offshoots arising from the base of the plant are taken to provide new plants. This is because the developing flower spike is cut off a few months before it is ready to emerge from the core, which subsequently swells and becomes sugar-enriched, a desirable quality for alcohol production.  The leaves are cut off during harvesting of the core, which can weigh over 50 kg. Shredding, roasting (or steaming) milling and fermenting are followed, in commercial production, by distillation and then blending to standardize the flavour of particular brands.

The high prices asked for bottled tequila do not reflect the poor cash return to the Mexican growers, who have suffered recent boom and bust periods, with some crops affected by serious epidemics of fungal and bacterial diseases.  The Mexican authorities seem to be just as protective as the wine-growers of the Champagne district of France of the name of their important local product, and the areas in which it can legally be grown. This, together with the lengthy period before a crop can be harvested, its size and quality depending on climate and soils, and the technicalities of processing, would surely discourage any serious tequila fancier from embarking on a do-it-yourself project.

It may be of interest that a rather similar member of the Agavaceae,  Furcraea foetida, a mistakenly-labelled, weedy species which grew in our back garden for about 25 years, allowed us to secure a current record in the Guinness Book of Records in 2002 for the tallest inflorescence ever recorded. It towered for almost 40 feet, on top of a further five feet or so of the substantial leafy base.  The long-awaited, sudden emergence of the flowering stem and the rate at which it grew each day were remarkable.  It beat the previous record, for an unrelated species, by about five feet, but we are sure there are still-taller relatives out there somewhere. Further information can be found in books such as:

Lawrence Kretchmer “Guide to Tequila” and Lance Cutler’s “The Tequila Lover’s Guide to Mexico”.

Also, a very exhaustive review with links to further information is available at: http://www.ianchadwick.cm/tequila/news.html.

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A great success in our vegetable garden over the last couple of years, is the perennial capsicum (it actually isn’t truly perennial, but lasts 3 – 4 years in the sub-tropics). Although small, the sweet capsicums have the distinct advantage that they don’t get stung by fruit fly and don’t get rotting patches as the big ones sometimes do in summer. In this respect they are rather like cherry tomatoes – much easier to grow than their larger cousins but just as tasty!

 Our bush is over two years old, and is about 80cm high, forming a clump about 1m across. It has developed a thick, gnarled trunk .The 8cm long fruit are shaped like a pointed chilli, but are sweet, not hot. They are formed all year round, and they can be picked green or left to ripen on the bush until bright red. The bush gets a bit of compost thrown around the base when I think of it, but otherwise it looks after itself in our veggie patch, which is regularly watered.

 A great use for the little pointed capsicums is to puree them when red and sieve the puree to remove the ‘plasticky’ skins (I put it through a mouli). Then freeze the puree in ice cube trays, empty the frozen cubes into a freezer bag, and use as required. It tastes really great added to chilli beans, spaghetti sauce or casseroles, as well as adding a lovely rich red colour. This is a vegetable I really recommend growing – it seems to love a subtropical climate and has become a permanent feature in our garden. The capsicums are always there on the bush whenever a recipe calls for them.

 The seeds came from Eden Seeds originally, so it is a non-hybrid. Eden Seeds have some wonderful old-fashioned varieties – you can contact them on www.edenseeds.com.au or phone 07 5533 1107

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• Peanuts   If you know someone who has a child who is allergic to peanuts, you must eliminate all soy from the diet. Other risk factors are other food allergies, a family history of peanut or soy allergies, a diagnosis of asthma, rhinitis or eczema or a family history of these diseases. Source: Letter from Ingrid Malmheden Yman PhD, Senior Chemist, Sweden National Food Administration to the New Zealand Ministry of Health 30/5/77. Soy goes by many aliases. If you are one of those that checks food labels then food processors are less likely to list “soy” than a technical term such as “textured vegetable protein (TVP)” textured plant protein, hydrolysed vegetable protein (HVP), vegetable protein concentrate, vegetable oil, vegetable broth, bouillon, natural flavour or mono-diglyceride that do not necessarily but are likely to come from soy. There’s an article on Soy by K.T. Daniel who is the author of “The Whole Soy Story: The Dark Side of America’s Favourite Health Food. The author is a board-certified clinical nutritionist.  Ref:  Ingrid Malmheden Yman PhD, Senior Chemist, Sweden National Food Administration to the New Zealand Ministry of Health 30/5/77
• Peanuts  Interesting news from Dr. Andy Clark. A team of British scientists have come one step closer to curing nut allergies after a small-scale clinical trial in which they successfully built up children’s tolerance to peanuts. Researchers at Addenbroke’s Hospital in Cambridge, England, gave small daily doses of peanut flour to four children who were severely allergic to peanuts, building up the amount over time. By the end of the trial, each child could ingest at least 10 peanuts without having any reaction which the scientists noted was more than enough to protect against any accidental ingestion through nut-contaminated foods. In the study, published in the journal Allergy, four children were initially given five milligrams of peanut flour mixed into yoghurt. Over the next six months, the dose was increased every fortnight until they could tolerate at least 800 mg — the equivalent of five whole peanuts. The trial is ongoing and 20 children aged seven to 17 are now involved with some able to ingest 12 peanuts a day. However, they must maintain their tolerance by ingesting five peanuts a day, said Andrew Clark, a consultant in paediatric allergy who led the research. “At the moment we know that if they continue to eat five peanuts a day, their tolerance is maintained. If they were to stop, then there is some evidence that tolerance would be lost and they may have a reaction,” he said. They would be monitored for the next three or four years to assess their tolerance levels, Clark said, adding that there was no reason why the clinical trial could not be extended to adults. “For all our participants, a reaction could lead to life-threatening anaphylactic shock. It’s not a permanent cure, but as long as they go on taking a daily dose they should maintain their tolerance,” he said.
• Olive Pollen  If you live in an olive-growing area, don’t be surprised if you start sneezing. A recent NZ Medical Journal Reports that pollen from olive trees is a major cause of respiratory allergy in Mediterranean countries causing the same symptoms as hayfever. The species of olive grown for fruit is Olea europea. It’s one of the Oleaceae family that also contains private (Ligustrum) Lilac (Syringa) and Ash (Fraxinus). Of all the family the olive is considered to have the most allergenic pollen. 

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This is a tree that is not well known or widely enough cultivated given its good taste and very useful characteristics. A small bush or tree to about 3 mtrs that can easily be kept to hedgerow size, by pruning.  It is obviously closely related to the common guava with the same basic structure. The seeds in this case are not a problem; they are small and unobtrusive. There is no strong aromatic taste/odour as occurs in the close guava relatives. The taste appeals to the majority of people; sweet/sour with a fruity taste described by some as like a pineapple jam, hence its other name of pineapple guava, which is confusing as the Feijoa has the same common name.

One of the things that make this fruit stand out is that it doesn’t suffer from fruit fly infestation; you can let the fruit fall onto the ground when ripe and eat them in the day. I have seen the occasional fruit with a tear in the skin infected. It must be the skin that prevents the infection. The fruit-spotting bug does sting the fruit but the result seems to be a small hard lump that doesn’t affect the edibility of it. The skin is good to eat even when the fruit is quite firm. Like some of the other Myrtaceae trees it is quite hardy; grows from the Amazon to Argentina and withstands temperatures to minus 2.2 deg Celsius. It’s drought hardy (can’t kill them in a pot with neglect) and I think that they will stand water logging as well. Some of the literature says that they won’t do well in light sand, but our place is sand and they grow well (loads of mulch might be the reason). They fruit readily in pots at about 600 mm high. It is remarkably slow to germinate from seed, taking 3 months at times to start, but then every seed seems to grow. Very hardy useful plant! There is quite a bit of information available on the internet and below is some information from Fruits of Warm Climates by Julia F. Morton, Miami, FL.

http://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/morton/brazilian_guava_ars.html

Distribution   The most wide-ranging guava relative, P. guineense occurs naturally from northern Argentina and Peru to southern Mexico, and in Trinidad, Martinique, Jamaica and Cuba, at medium elevations. It is cultivated to a limited extent in Martinique, Guadeloupe, the Dominican Republic and southern California. Trials in Florida have not been encouraging. At Agartala in Tripura, northeast India, this plant has become thoroughly naturalized and runs wild.

Cultivars      While no named cultivars have been reported, this species has been crossed with the common guava and the hybrids are dwarf, hardy and bear heavy crops.

Soil            The plant will not develop satisfactorily on light sandy soil.

Food Uses    This guava is suitable for baking and preserving. It makes a distinctive jelly which some consider superior to common guava jelly.

Other Uses   The wood is strong and used for tool handles, beams, planks and agricultural instruments. The bark, rich in tannin, is used for curing hides.

Medicinal Uses    In the interior of Brazil, a decoction of the bark or of the roots is employed to treat urinary diseases, diarrhoea and dysentery. In Costa Rica, it is said to reduce varicose veins and ulcers on the legs. A leaf decoction is taken to relieve colds and bronchitis. (Willie says that guava leaves are commonly used in Indonesia for diarrhoea and are very effective)

The description of the fruit is quite a bit different from what we have in Australia; it is possible that ours is a hybrid. “The fruit, round or pear-shaped, is from 1/8 to 1 in (1-2.5 cm) wide, with yellow skin, thick, pale-yellowish flesh surrounding the white central pulp, and of acid, resinous, slightly strawberry-like flavour. It contains numerous small, hard seeds and is quite firm even when fully ripe.” Quite different to what I’ve seen and tasted – what we have is a very good fruit.

Recommended…..and the club has some small plants.

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We farm 14 properties here in Rochedale and we have farms as well at Kalbar and Warwick which is about 1-2 hours inland from the coast and the main product that we grow are Shallots, Parsley, Chinese Vegetables, Cos Lettuce and now that we have our new packing shed we’ll be going into the mescalin mixes as well. This new packing shed has come about because the world is changing some people might say for the better, some people might say for the worse but everybody today is paranoid about food so the old concept of packing in an open store is over and they now want us to pack inside a sealed coolroom type facility so when we get going there’ll be masks/boots/gowns purely for the issues of food safety. We have two areas here: the first is the dirty area and the next will be the hygiene area. The produce will go into the first part of the coolroom and have all the dirt taken off it then go into the next facility where it’s hydrocooled so it’s immediately taken down to 1º and this happens within one hour of harvesting a product so the quicker you get the produce cooled, the longer the product lasts. The water is sanitized during washing of the Vegetables and one is a spa type system which is air agitated to get it going and the other is a shower type. It’s a type of chlorine but a special type which is registered for food.  A lot of the product we do ends up in prepared salads and because of some of the food scares they’ve had in recent times, people are paranoid about the product being contaminated. It can be at Mrs. Crocketts the same day and they can prepare that night and you could buy it the following day at the store. If the product has any bacteria in it, and it’s put into their salads, it will grow in there so it has to be removed before. With the shallots, they’re put into a plastic sleeve wet – we don’t dry them. Coolroom temperature is between 2 and 4º but if we get a really cold day in winter, the coolroom can feel warmer. Sheryl Is this area being subdivided shortly? Rodney Yes, we’ll be going to Kalbar and Warwick so we’ll use an air-conditioned truck to bring it down to process it here. We have a staff of around 55 so it’s a fair operation. Some of our customers also want other farms to put their product through us. Our product goes to Melbourne/Townsville and Sydney. Sheryl What’s in the white buckets? Rodney We’re using new technology for soil sterilisation. It’s a machine which uses steam and hot lime. George Basically it’s lime that’s gone through the kiln and hasn’t been rehydrated. Rodney The reason they call it hot lime is because you put water with it and you get a very hot reaction so that’s the purpose of the lime, it reacts when you put it in the soil with the steam. George That’s one of the classic things of getting rid of bodies isn’t it? Rodney Don’t know – I’ve never tried it! We haven’t used methyl bromide for many years mainly because it just got too expensive. Mark What are you trying to destroy in the soil? Rodney When you’re growing some of the crops that we grow, it’s not possible to grow and mechanical harvest them if you have weed populations so it’s aimed at controlling weeds. Sheryl Do you steam the soil before putting in every new crop? Rodney No, steam has been around for a very long time but when they just use steam it kills everything in the soil so using steam with the hot lime, you don’t use as much heat in the ground but it lasts for a longer period of time so you keep the temperature at 60º and it gets rid of a lot of the bad guys in the ground but the good ones live at a higher temperature. As soon as the temperature has dropped in the soil which is the same day, you can plant. The machine goes on tracks and is like a rotary hoe but it only turns very slowly. It’s not a primary tilling machine so you have to have your ground in prime condition first and it goes down about 8 inches and it also controls nematodes as well. We’re still in the experimental stage with this machine because it does lift your pH so in these types of soil where they are naturally acidic, it’s not such a problem but some of your black soils in the Lockyer might be different. Sheryl What do you keep your pH at? Rodney Around 6 to 6½ . Without applying lime in these soils, you’re struggling to get above 5. We also have a machine that distils the water before it goes into the machine. We use to use dolomite or gromag but now we don’t because we can’t afford to be doing both. Bob What’s the best lime to lower your pH? Rodney That depends on who you’re talking to. George Do you get soil/leaf analysis done? Rodney Yes, we just use the government one or a private lab Simbio at Coorparoo. Joe Where do you get your main irrigation from?  Rodney  We have a dam and recycle our water so that after we wash the product, the water goes into our dam and is then recycled out onto the farm. We have bores and a creek supply – no town water. George The water table around this area was dropping rather significantly for a while. Rodney At this end of Rochedale, there’s virtually no water left and hasn’t been for quite some time. Only some of the shallow ones recharge. With the others, you’re just left with a sand bed.  We grow Chinese Vegetables all through the summer then put in Dutch Carrots and rotate the crops. The Chinese Vegetables have a natural chemical in them that helps in nematode control so by growing these and planting our carrots after, we get the extra benefit. A lot of these are currently oversized because when it should have been picked, it wasn’t because of the weather. We try not to get the same vegetable in the same plot more than once a year. We probably have 20% of the shallot market. We supply through Coles and you can’t supply unless you have a QA (quality assurance) program in place. Choy Sum has a thin long stem, Pak Choy is short and fat you’ll see 3 to a bunch, Buk Choy has a white stem but it depends on who you buy from!! Woolworths sometimes have them around the other way! You’ll also see a flowering Choy Sum and we use to grow them but we switched over to the hybrid non-flowering type. In Asia they like the flowering types but they don’t here in Australia so at certain times of the year, we’d have to hoe them in because they’d go to flower and nobody would buy them. We use both plugs (seedlings) and direct seed. Sheryl Do you chill any of your seed prior to planting out? Rodney No Sheryl I bought back from Vietnam some slow bolting Coriander to give to members in the Club and they presoak then chill it prior to planting out over there. Bob Why don’t you have white cabbage moth? I also don’t see grass hoppers. Rodney We don’t see white moth these days. It’s interesting that in the old days when they use to use DDT and others, and it use to multiply in those days but since we’ve got newer/softer chemicals so we now get diamondback moth so whether it’s got to do with birds around I don’t know. Our biggest problem is centre cluster grubs or diamondback moth in the Chinese Vegetables. They can be worse than the cabbage white moth but the good thing about these with the BT’s around, they’re good to control but it’s only for the caterpillars. BT is bassilus theringensis.  We use Nitrophoska fertiliser before planting out and we might put a bit of Potassium Nitrate through the water if they need it during growing. We used Potassium at one stage on Shallots and use CK88 as a side dressing. There’s an issue with food safety. We use to use a lot of fowl manure in years gone by but we’re not allowed to use it now – very shortly it’s going to be banned by the EPA. Sheryl How are the organic people going to go? Rodney They’ll have to use treated compost. We’re not even allowed to use Dynamic Lifter because the process is not good enough – it’s the bacteria. We’re not allowed to use anything organic – nothing that hasn’t been treated. One of the issues we are dealing with at the moment because we don’t use fowl manure anymore and because we grow a lot of crops a year, you get into trouble with the organic carbon in the ground so one of the issues we are looking at is having composts that conform to a certain standard so that if it is composted properly and you get the heat processes right, you can get them out. What happens is that it can take 12 months and people take shortcuts so now there’s a QA coming in and it will be certified that it has no ecoli or salmonella in it. If your soil structure starts to deteriorate, you get erosion. In the past, people got sick and didn’t worry about it but when people get food poisoning these days and it triggers an alert in the system, they can easily find out the common source so there are litigation issues. They recently had a case in America of green onions coming in from Mexico and people got hepatitis and it destroyed the green onion market over there. The diamondback moth is immune to a lot of the harder chemicals. We harvest parsley by machine and the rest are done manually. Bob How long have you got to pick them? Rodney About a week Sheryl How much do workers earn? Rodney 16 cents a bunch. Australians don’t pick product these days and haven’t since the late 80’s – our staff are mainly Asians/Iraqi and Pakistani but our best lady on Shallots has picked 43 tubs in a day and there’s 40 bunches in a tub! The average worker would do 20-30 tubs a day but an Australian would be lucky to pick 6-9 tubs a day. We’re in a lot of trouble with labour these days. In the 80’s when all the Vietnamese and Cambodians were coming in, we were embarrassed with the amount of people coming in every day wanting work but now it’s almost impossible to get those people because they now either have their own farms or have found other work. Some of the people who started with me here in the 80’s are now very rich people – very frugal with their money and saved. They’re highly valued in factories these days. We’re looking at machine harvesting now. The government’s migration policy now is geared toward business or rich people and you can get into this country if you’ve got money or a special skill but they don’t class the workers as having a special skill. Historically, if you look at Australia if you go back before the war, all the Italians were coming in and   look at who owns all the cane farms up north. Australia’s been built on a migrant policy; they came in, worked hard then got their own businesses. Sheryl What about backpackers? Rodney We don’t get many here and this work is different because we’re picking 52 weeks of the year, so if you work here you have a job for life. Up around Bundaberg, they still don’t get enough. Merv One of the sad things is with both Federal and State with regards priority, primary industry is very low and when you look at horticulture, it’s worse. They’re doing something with cattle. We were up at the Nambour Research Station a couple of years ago and they were cutting back as fast as they could and if you didn’t have the money in the door, they didn’t do anything so you’re faced with this problem that Australia is going global and is not interested in primary industry anymore.  Sheryl Depending on the soil and fertiliser, will the same vegetable taste the same as the next lot ie how do you control the taste? eg if you buy hydroponic lettuce, some of them are bitter occasionally. Rodney There are a number of factors that will control taste and texture and one is whether it is consistently grown. If you have a bitter lettuce, then almost certainly it is because at some stage it’s got stressed, the longer it takes to grow, or if it hasn’t been getting enough water but if the lettuce is grown evenly, it’ll have the sweetness. Other factors are frost or excessive cold or excessive rain that affects the ability of the plant to get oxygen into the soil so if the plant normally takes 10 weeks and because of lack of or too much water or something else and the period is lengthened out to 11 weeks, the plant will not taste as good. The other thing that affects it is we are very close to the coast here and although they grow faster here and they actually taste better but they don’t keep as good. If you get a product of ours from Kalbar or Warwick, it will keep better than from here Sheryl What time frame are we talking about? Rodney It will be at least a week. We have a high humidity here and we get a nice soft plant but because it is softer, it doesn’t keep as well so a plant out of Lockyer/Kalbar will physically last and you won’t get break down because it’s not a softer plant. It will always taste better from here than up there but won’t keep as good. We direct seed Parsley into the ground and harvest it for 12 months and it’s hard to get your head around how much is used. The biggest quantity of Parsley we’ve ever done was for Mrs. Crockets at Christmas and we did 16 tonne in one week so that’s an awful lot of Parsley! We have 3 other farms all in Parsley. We machine harvest the Curley Parsley or sometimes it’s called Triple Curled or Frizz but this one is called Inca. We also grow Italian or Continental as it’s referred to in the market and it’s sold by weight. We also handpick and it’s sold by the bunch. If it gets too rain on, it’ll go yellow. We’ll reharvest it again in 3 weeks time and do this for 12-15 months but it depends on the weather. If it gets too tall, we’ll come back and mow it just above the ground and throw the stalks away. The height we cut at depends on the amount of yellow there is underneath because if we cut too much yellow, they have too much work in the packing shed. The parsley harvester fits onto the back of one of our tractors and it has a special type of bandsaw we have made up which cuts the parsley and takes it onto the elevator (about 1 mtr long) and is put straight into a bin and it will harvest around 1 tonne an hour. The blades don’t last very long and we can’t sharpen them. The machine was made in New Zealand but designed in Germany. You could grow parsley in a pot for 12 months no trouble. The biggest trouble we have is with lady beetles which are good but for some reason or other customers don’t like them in their salads! In springtime we have a lot of trouble. In dryer weather you get the red spider coming in that doesn’t give us much trouble and you get the lady beetles coming in to eat them. Peter How often would you water? Rodney Every couple of days for 1-2 hours at 4ml an hour – 10ml every 2 days. The only trouble we have with the machine is with Italian Parsley when it’s wet and it gets a bit slippery at the front of the machine. Bob How fast do you go? Walking speed? Rodney Depends on the type of parsley but probably a bit faster than walking speed. With about 80% of the properties around here, you’ll see big concrete open water tanks because the bores were never good enough to pump straight out onto the farm and they would have their bores going 24 hours a day, the tank would fill up overnight and the following day, they’d use this as their water for the day and you might have several bores going into the one tank to get the quantity of water they would need. The steaming machine is made in Italy and the one here was only No. 4 in the world. The hot lime is kept in a stainless steel hopper and it drops down into a hydraulically driven rotary hoe type blade and it has 2 bars in it set at different levels that injects steam in it. It also has a boiler in it that injects steam into the ground mixed with the lime. Dale What fuel do you use? Rodney  Diesel.  The machine is very slow and does 75-100 metres per hour. It cost $250,000 Sheryl How often would you have to do it? Rodney  We’re hoping once a year. It’s not economical to have someone going in there weeding. Our seeder came from NZ – has 12 rows and is electronically driven and you can turn one of them off and plant a six row. The configuration is very easy to change. It has a little foam in the centre that spins electronically and the seed falls down between the foam. I went to Italy and Amsterdam looking for harvesters and met the New Zealanders over there! We also have a weeder that fits onto the front of the tractor and it weeds the lettuce. We’re looking at designing Shallot harvesters, Chinese Vegetable harvesters etc. because we can’t get enough staff. We use to have 6 people to plant out Celery and Lettuce – one driver, 3 people on the machine and 2 others organising for 2 days but with the automatic planter, it’s 1 person 1 day.

Article compiled by Sheryl Backhouse