2020

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During a journey through Peninsula Malaysia in February 2006, I saw industrial-scale Oil Palm and Rubber Plantations from one end of the country to the other, broken up by small holdings containing a diverse range of annuals and tree crops e.g. Sugar Cane, Tapioca (Cassava) Rice, Maize Melons, Pineapple, Banana, Papaw, Mango, Guava, Pummelo, Lemon, Longan, Soursop, Rollinia, Starfruit, Dragonfruit, Duku, Durian, Coconut and Teak timber. For me the highlight of the peninsula was the Cameron Highlands, a high-rainfall area of rainforest-clad mountains, 200 kms north-west of the capital Kuala Lumpur. Ideal conditions for horticulture are provided by the cool mountain air at an altitude of 1500-1800 metres together with higher than average rainfall and reasonable-looking orange-brown soils.

Large tea estates are commonplace throughout, especially on the less-accessible slopes higher up. These were founded from the 1920’s by British expatriates with colonial experience from India. Some have their own tea-processing factories on site, together with workers’ quarters villages for the hand-pickers who can earn up to AUD$16.00 per day (paid at the rate of 8 cents per kilogram). Apart from the tea and he odd tiny plot of bananas or citrus, no formal orchards of tree crops were seen. Some scattered durians and bananas are grown semi-wild along the forest margins.

The predominant activity is the growing of vegetables. Enormous shade houses cover almost every available bit of flat land; steep hillsides are infinitely stepped and terraced; and channels and pipes from hilltop springs and ponds feed irrigation networks throughout. Whilst some Cabbage, Beans Chilli, Choko, Tomato, Taro etc are planted out in the open fields, the majority of growing appears to take place under the filtered light of various types of shade-houses. These are built in many different styles. Whilst the very latest versions include permanent portal-frame steel constructions like our own industrial buildings, most are flimsily built with light steel tubing or light hardwood posts set into concrete or rammed-earth footings, supporting flat or igloo-shaped coverings of green/yellow/grey woven fabrics, flat or corrugated fibreglass sheeting or heavy-duty clear plastic wrap. A lot of this super-structured appears fairly weathered and new constructions are commonplace. Considering the big picture with many hectares of valleys and hillsides sheeted over with short-term plastic coverings, I expect there would be a significant waste disposal problem. Underneath the shade-houses, the various crops are planted either directly in the ground in cultivated rows or in individual pots fed with micro-drippers or in hydroponic piping at waist height. Commonly seen were strawberry, tomato, cabbage cauliflower, broccoli, lettuce, Asian greens, chilli, capsicum, ornamental pot plants and various cut flowers including roses. Less common were orchids, cactus and butterflies.

In the various small towns, farm-supply warehouses provide the infrastructure needed for packaging and freight-collection for trucking the produce down to the closest lowland city of Ipoh and beyond. Technical support is provided at the largest town of Tanah Rata by a government research station – a branch of MARDI (Malaysian Agricultural Research and Development Institute). Visits by appointment only.

Throughout peninsula Malaysia, civil engineers have prioritized soil erosion control in view of the high intensity rainfalls of around 2000-2500 throughout. Even more so in the highlands with bigger downpours, steeper slopes and disturbed groundcovers. Even the most minor public road is sealed and provided with generously sized drainage culverts. The road-cuttings on the mountain-sided accesses into the highlands are mostly cut with stepped sides, often completely sprayed over with pumped concrete and always drained by an intricate network of concreted channels, often fitted with their own pipe spout “fountains”. Anchor bolts commonly lock the rock-faces back into the hillsides; and the latest “permeable” trend is towards using blocks of loose rocks encased in wire-netting, stacked up against the slopes like sandbags.

When all else fails, roadside landslips are temporarily stabilized by wrapping with huge swathes of blue poly tarp or clear plastic to keep the rain off. Other attractions of the area include numerous forest walking trails, waterfalls and excellent tourist accommodation, making this a very desirable destination for anybody contemplating a visit to Malaysia.

Note from Sheryl: Robert is a long-time member who lives at Lillian Rock in NSW and grows tamarillos commercially.

His previous trip was to Cambodia and Laos. 

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I recently had the pleasure of spending six days at Alan and Susan Carle’s Botanical Ark in Mossman which is about 70km north of Cairns. A lot of us know of this amazing garden and what a wonderful attitude the Carle’s have to preserving the fruits and plants of the tropical rainforests. I didn’t go there to enjoy the view; I went there to get my hands dirty!

Michael Fabian ex Limberlost Nursery in Cairns is a man with the most amazing knowledge of grafting, marcotting and seeds I have met and is helping Alan marcott many of the rare trees that have never had that process applied to them before including Garcinia varieties, Durians, Nephelium (Rambutan, Pulasans) and Baccaurea. After Mike had cut off the marcott from the parent plant, my job was to pot them up and put them in the mist house. Over 2 days, we did 500 plants. The idea is to sell them through the local market and nurseries so keep your eyes and ears open for further news and you may be able to add to your collection of tropical plants.

Marcotting is one of the easiest ways of getting new plants that I have seen. Now I know a lot of you know what marcotting involves however Mike said the real trick is aftercare. For the first six weeks, the marcott has to be in high humidity constantly. Don’t apply fertiliser because the developing roots cannot take up nutrients and may burn. Once the roots are strong enough, the plant must now be placed in a shaded area for a further six weeks (these are estimated times for our sub-tropical climate) before being planted out. If you do marcott, the potting mixture should be coarse sand with some perlite in it.

The rest of my stay involved helping Susan with some catering for various groups from all over Australia. After picking the last Mangosteens for the season, Durians and the South American Sapote Quararibea Cordata, most nights were spent eating these fruit and although I have previously mentioned how to pick a good Mangosteen, here it is again. Hold the fruit in your hand, press your thumb on the skin and if the skin gives, then the fruit is OK. Sometimes you may see a bright yellow sap coming out of the skin – do not buy this fruit as it’s no good. When the fruit is as hard as cannon balls and you have managed to saw through it, the flesh is often rotten.

 I have volunteered my services for another week next year so I will let you know how I go.

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I spent five weeks travelling the length and breadth of the country and arrived mid Oct. which is considered the off-season and is the cooler time to visit with Feb-Mar the optimum.  Watermelons are grown on a raised bed with plastic just as strawberries are grown here. There are two types of coconut: the land type and one that grows in water. They use the fronds from the water type to make thatching for their roof which will last 5-6 years. I visited a coconut candy factory which was very interesting. Nothing is wasted of the coconut. The candy tastes like a soft caramel. I bought some to bring back for you to try but when I was getting a bus back to Saigon from the Mekong, I declined the seat in the back as the mini-bus was full so they put the two passengers that were in the front seat into the back and I was given their seats. I was so embarrassed to put them out of their seat that I shared the caramels around. I had already been in a situation in the north-west where there were 21 of us on a 9 seater! I never saw any orange citrus – they suffer from Greening disease so don’t change colour. Pineapple 20 cents, Dragon Fruit 50 cents; 10 bananas for a $1.00; Pummelo 50 cents – $1.00; Rambutans 30 cents kg. Now these are the prices the Vietnamese pay – not what they charge foreigners! I bought a kg of Mangosteen for $3.00 and most had to be thrown away. I’ve since learnt from Asher that when you buy Mangosteen, you must pick them yourself and the outside of the fruit has to be soft when you squeeze them and mine were rock hard! There are a lot of low-lying islands in the Mekong delta (reminds me of Venice – much flooding during the rainy season) and I thought there would have been midges everywhere but no sign of them.  They use open irrigation canals about 5 metres apart and a metre deep with Longans the main fruit grown in the area I visited. The trees are grown quite close perhaps 2-3 metres apart and have been cinctured many times and you’ll see where they’ve taken out one main branch. The bees I saw to pollinate their trees are of the non-stinging type but look very different to our native bees. Fish are raised in the canals so that would avoid mosquito larvae. In other larger fish pond areas, their method of collection is a battery pack on their back and two rods in the water to stun the fish. Rubbish bins don’t appear to be used for waste collection and the curious thing for me was that I never saw any ants/flies swarm onto the rubbish.

Cassava must be processed to remove naturally occurring toxins and reduce spoilage. It is milled into a flour. They also slice it up and dry it by the side of the road in great quantities and feed it to their pigs.

At the Sofri Research Station they hang 2 strands of video tape around the trees but put it up only during fruiting time as they don’t want the birds/bats to get use to it. They don’t know why it works but it does. They told me that you will have more of a problem with birds/bats in a small backyard situation but farmers there found that when they have a large number of fruit trees, they don’t seem to get the problem.

Pitaya are grown on square concrete posts 1½ mtrs above ground, 25cms thick, 3 mtrs apart and cuttings are grown on all four sides and then taped to the post. With this particular variety when they reach the top, they just trail down. There are no wires between the posts for them to climb along.

Sapodillas are ripe when you scratch the skin and it appears brown – this technique avoids the grainy/gritty texture and won’t harm the fruit. It’s nice blended with crushed ice as a juice.

Pollination   The ornamental betalnut is used for pollination in the orchard as it attracts the stingless native bees.

Carambola   loves water

Guava     There are 21 different varieties. They just use plastic bags (any colour) around the fruit to keep out fruit fly because there’s no spray that is effective however this year they are trialing baits.

Longans   They girdle only one variety of Longan ie ringbark 1cm all the way around the branch and remove the bark after the flush of new leaves are nearly mature – the Du Yabour variety. (the skin of the fruit is brown in colour) There are tropical and sub-tropical Longans and the sub-tropicals will never ever flower in tropical conditions. If you want them to flower, you have to apply Potassium Chlorite KCL03 and this is applied when the new leaves are fully mature – 30gms per metre for radius or 15gms per sq.mtr of the canopy. After fruiting, all varieties are pruned.

Mangoes  There are 130 varieties of Mangoes and they can manipulate the tree to produce flowering at any time of the year. To induce flowering from the vegetative state to reproductive growth, they water stress and use chemical fertiliser. We stop fertiliser or use just a minor dose of nitrogen to make the roots weaker. If this does not produce results, then we cincture the trunk. Sheryl What stage of plant growth do you cincture?  A. After fruiting we promote new growth to get new flushing, then we consider when we want the fruit and from that point we count back to the time we apply this technique and it’s used 6-7 months before we want to have fruit. Sheryl So you cincture the trunk 30cm from the ground ie 2-3 months before flowering and Coaltar is used as a growth retardant in conjunction with this process and is applied directly on the tree trunk. Our Mangoes give 2 crops per year – one main crop and then a minor crop.

Pineapple The farmer prefers to grow the very sweet slightly serrated leafed Queen variety because it’s easier to grow and sells well. The other smooth leaf variety with a few slight serrations around the tip is Cayenne but is not as sweet and is used for canning and juicing. 

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The tour was conducted by the now retired owner Bob Brinsmead. The farm covers 170 acres.

Sheryl How did you get into this Bob?

Bob I had some farming background and this use to be the experimental farm and I use to come out here as a boy so I was familiar with it then they moved the Station so when it came on the market, I bought it

 Sheryl What were you growing beforehand?

Bob Sugarcane, bananas and pineapples. 

Sheryl How much water do you put on? 

Bob We rely heavily on rainfall – I don’t think we are even irrigating. We tend to irrigate mostly young trees.

Abiu  (Pouteria caimito) We’d have about 80 of these but not many bearing. We have seedlings which are doing just as well as the grafted.

Acerola  (Malpighia glabra) If you prune you miss a year’s crop – they won’t bear fruit on young wood.

Ambarilla (Hog Plum) I’ve selected out 3 that have a better flavoured fruit from the Malcases. They call them the Poor Mans Mango. The best way of processing them is that if you use them when they’re green and you grate them up, you can use it in a salad. Willie The leaves are also nice for cooking and to use in a raw salad. You can also pickle the young fruit.

Araca  (Eugenia stipitate) Very sour like a big soft guava but they make a beautiful juice. Got them from a chap up at Mossman. They bear quite heavily.

Avocadoes  Sheryl What type of fertiliser do you give your Avocados? Bob Cracker Dust and mainly foliar fertiliser – liquid Nitrophoska twice a year. A really nice Avocado to eat is Reed. Peter Do you inject your Avocadoes every year? Bob We tend to spray with Phosphorous Acid but we have been injecting them this year. The Linda variety is very large and doesn’t grow brown when you cut it.

Black Sapote  I have 3 varieties. I like the Mossman the best, the big flat one. They’re a very vigorous tree, we don’t fertilize or irrigate them but we do spray to keep the black soot off.  Joe  We have one that’s a rusty colour inside. Sheryl  Sell the tree under PBR and make yourself lots of money!

Canistel It’s very sweet. This group of fruit along with the Mammy Sapote tastes a bit like pumpkin. You can eat the skin of this fruit. You can put this in a pie crust with a bit of cream and it reminds me of an American Pumpkin Pie. They’re a bit dry if they’re not fully ripe.

Ceylon Hill Cherry   It’s a very beautiful shrub

Citrus  I got these bare-rooted from Fitzroy Nursery in Rockhampton. You would never grow Citrus in this area commercially. You would never get colour in this climate that you would get in a dry Mediterranean climate. You would never compete with a Californian type climate. Gayndah is the closest type of climate as well as South Australia. California will grow a cleaner more coloured fruit. 

Sheryl  So you need the water in winter as opposed to summer?

Bob Too much moisture in the air around summer but the Citrus have been so popular with some of our Asian visitors that we’ve just grown a big patch of Mandarins so they can just go and eat them. 

Sheryl  The Californian Coast gets very high moisture in the air when the cool air meets with the warm current and the whole coast mists.

Feijoas  Prefer a colder climate

Green Sapote  Just mash into a creamy consistency and have with ice-cream. It’s the best of all. Some seedling trees are OK but others are not.

Guavas  Prune them and open them out and you’ll have better fruit. I don’t market any of them but we let the tourists come in and eat what they like.

Ketembila  Slightly astringent but makes a beautiful jam, round purple fruit.

Kwai Muk  (Artocarpus lakoocha) Related to the Jackfruit but it’s never fruited.  George There’s one in the Botanic Gardens

Langsat  We only had one survive on the property and as they take about 15 years to fruit but it may be too cold here for it to fruit.

Lucmo  Very slow growing – very much like the Canistel

Lychee  Netted for protection against birds.  Sheryl Ever had hail here? I notice there’s no gaps for hail to fall down. Bob  We had to get a new net! There’s was so much hail that it dropped right down to the ground. Urea twice a year and Nitrophoska now.

Mabolo  (Diospyros discolour) Velvet Apple Fruit has dark brown velvet skin, creamy flesh and sweet flavour.  It’s now a seedling as the graft died.

Malay Apple ( Sy. malacances) In the same family as a Lillypilly, Wax Jambu, Water Cherry, Malay Apple and well worth growing. Another one which is really beautiful is the Giant Lau Lau from New Guinea

Mamey Sapote Sheryl  How do you know when it’s ripe? Bob  You scratch the base of the fruit and they should be going brown but if they’re still green then leave them alone. There are 2 varieties Pontin and Gray. There’s also the Magana which is a big one and it has a courser flavour – they’re great in milk shakes and this variety has a pointy end. The round one is Pontin. In Spanish it’s the Mother.

Mammea Americana  It was a male/female but we lost the male. We had a late cold snap in October and itwiped out the new growth. George There’s suppose to be bi-sexual ones as well. Sheryl  They were fruiting up at Maroochy.

Mangoes  The whole district has had a poor crop this year. I feel like putting a chainsaw into them. What I think I’ll do is inject them with round-up but not enough to kill the tree so it keeps it very sparse and let the Pitaya run all over it. We’ve tried 50 varieties of Indian Mangoes but none of them do any good here.

Matisia  (Matisia cordata)  They’re a bit like a Black Sapote but sweeter. They’re just surviving here as they’re more tropical.

Miracle Fruit (Synsepalum dulcificum) Grow in semi-shade 

Monkey Pot  (Lecythis pisonis)  Has tasty large nuts

Olive It only had 4 olives on it!

Pawpaw  They’re looking a bit unhealthy but unless you keep up with a bit of fungicide on  them this can happen and we don’t like to spray. They get the marks on the skin at the end of the season.

Persimmon   You need a cover over them to stop the birds from getting at them.

Pitaya We have just fertilised and watered them recently and they’ve just gone through a  dry spell – 2 or 3 weeks when they were stressed. Besides the Cracker Dust and  Fowl Manure we give them an NPK dressing every 6 weeks so after the water and  fertiliser, these will really start to bud everywhere in 2-3 weeks. They need a heavy structure to support them. Large upright posts and a post-rail on top and perhaps put in 2 rows a metre apart so they can go over each side. When they get too large, just go through with a cane knife and hack them off. We’re going to plant more yellows.

Sheryl One of our members John Picone has imported different varieties from  Vietnam.

Bob Chili is probably the biggest grower, Columbia and Israel where they  grow them under solarweave because it’s too hot.

Pitomba Haven’t done real well yet – very nice tasting like an apricot – but they take years to  fruit well.

George If you had it in a more sheltered spot it would grow a bit better.

Poshte Tastes like a red Custard Apple

Quirsaros Jeff  I get a lot of flowers but no fruit

Sapodilla   Very slow growing and need a lot of nitrogenous fertiliser and they will bear heavily  when they get old – it’s is one of the highest sugar content fruits and belongs to the  family Sapotecea.

Soursop  (Annona muricta) We haven’t had much luck with grafted ones. The Puerto Rican one is doing OK but Unlike Custard Apples it has to be ripe whilst still on the tree.  You can’t pick it green so it’s not ideal for marketing as it doesn’t have a long shelf life but we sell a lot here. It can go a bit jelly inside when it’s too ripe. I like a squeeze of lemon over them. There’s quite a variation among them.

Sheryl How do you tell the difference?

Bob     They have a different skin. The smoother skin one is mucosa, the bareba is a white flesh. Most of these will bear fruit in the autumn but a few will hang through to winter but if you try and eat this fruit at the end of winter, they taste yucky – no  flavour – but once the sap starts flowing, then the taste comes back.

Star Apple  are in the same family as Abiu. You don’t get a lot out of them and if you don’t eat near the skin, it’s quite pleasant. Don’t eat them too green or too ripe. Don’t grow the ungrafted varieties as the crop is unreliable.

Joe What particular variety? Peter  How do you get them to fruit – mine flower but no fruit?

Bob  I had one like that and I got rid of it and put in another variety.  Sheryl Do they need cross-pollination with another? Bob It may help.

Star Gooseberry Very sour but if you cook them up in brown sugar and boil and boil till they turn red they’re nice. Willie Chica acida formerly known as Philanthus acidus

Wax Jambu Very beautiful tree with lovely red fruit

Yellow Mangosteen Can be grown from seed. Good flavour.

Fertiliser – We use Cracker Dust It’s a blue metal and we mix this with fowl dung (about 3:1) but you can change it as there’s no rules but it has a number of advantages. There was an ABC programme on it. There are a lot of minerals in it and its pH is about 9 so it’s nearly as good as putting lime on the ground so you mineralise your ground. 

Sheryl What’s the difference between Cracker Dust and Blue Metal?

Bob Fineness. Blue Metal is too course. I’ve found that just by putting it around trees, that the roots come up into it and it’s very inexpensive. You can use it instead of top soil because it’s easier to spread and the grass will green up where you’ve put it – put it on at anytime of the year.

Down at the bottom section there’s a sign “Lava Tree” so guess who fell for that one!!! 

Compiled by Sheryl Backhouse

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I’ve been managing this orchard for 10 years and grow about 2,500 Persimmon and 1,200 Avocados.

Weather has badly affected the orchard this season which has taken the edge off the quality of the fruit so there’s a lot of skin damage though it doesn’t affect the internal quality. We may look into rain covers but that is a fairly intensive capital exercise. The orchard here is 10 years old. They’re a long lasting tree – not like Stonefruit or Citrus which have reached the end of their life after 10-15 years. The oldest orchards in Australia would be 25 years and they’re still producing commercially. My father put in a Persimmon orchard in 1985 – one of the first in Australia.

If you eat a green Astringent Persimmon, it’s like a green banana and very unpleasant and the Japanese discovered a few genetic mutations 200 years ago and they had lost their astringency.  So they started selecting varieties and 3-5% of their crosses actually had this non-astringent quality, so over that period they settled on two main varieties – Fuyu and Jiro.

Jiro has a couple of bud sport variations known as Maekawa Jiro and Ichikikei Jiro, and we grow Ichikikei Jiro which is the big square fruit and also a few Fuyu trees. Fuyu is probably the world standard – a nice sweet round fruit, a bit smaller than Jiro. The taste is very similar. The Fuyu is supposed to be a bit sweeter and Fuyu have a tougher skin, but if you eat the skin, then it’s not as pleasant as a Jiro, and Fuyu is a more vigorous tree.

We also have a handful of the Astringent Nightingale in the ground. The Italians are probably the biggest market for astringent persimmons. Anywhere in China, Japan, Korea are probably our biggest market, they don’t eat the soft astringent persimmon. They do grow a whole range of astringent varieties as well but they treat them with carbon dioxide while they are still crispy which removes the astringency. They put them in a carbon dioxide cool room for about 24 hours and that takes the astringency out.

The Israelis grow a small astringent variety called Triumph and sell it as Sharon fruit and the Spanish have developed a new astringent variety called Rojo Brilliante which is proving quite a hit in Europe where they have undertaken a major marketing campaign.

Sheryl:      Can you explain the difference between Fuyu and Jiro and why you grow Jiro?
Stephen:   I started to grow persimmons because I thought it was easy but unfortunately every year it seems to become more challenging for various reasons.  But when we planted Jiro there was an opening in the market because most of the Australian crop at the time was Fuyu picked in April. Unfortunately, a lot of people thought the same as me and there are very big orchards of Jiro at Gympie and Gatton so I wish I was growing Fuyu now and as Jiro get older, Jiro fruit tend to mark very badly as the trees get more crowded.

The DPI have conducted trials on various aspects on quality and production and one of the interesting things we have found is that if you look at the first row on the outside of my orchard, we have a NZ product called Extenday® plastic mulch which reflects light back into the tree.  It’s a mat you roll out on the ground. The fruit quality is better and earlier and the skin quality has held up to the rain a bit better. It gives colour and sweetness to the fruit so although we get enough light, we’re just trialling it. It’s available in 100mtr rolls and costs $300.00 from a Victorian agriculture wholesale company. They use it in Victoria on their Pink Lady apple orchards for 3 weeks just before harvest so the fruit gets a nice blush otherwise the fruit just gets red on parts of it and green on other parts.

The other difference between Jiro and Fuyu is (that) Jiro is less vigorous and this keeps our labour costs down while also being quite a productive tree. Fuyu tend to be more vigorous and can get 3mtr shoots, but we’re working on ways to control vigour, so commercial orchards look at plant growth regulators, but also getting fruit on the tree is the best way of controlling vigour. I’m trying to hang my Jiro late to get a sweeter fruit and colour but we got caught this year with the rain. To get seedless, plant a Fuyu or Jiro as they don’t produce male flowers. We get seed from most of the astringent types. A lot of persimmons produce male and female flowers. We graft most of the year, particularly in early spring through to summer, but the most successful is to put a side bud or a side graft on in February to early March (late summer).  I use a chip bud as a T bud doesn’t work as the bark is not flexible but I mostly wedge graft or you can use a side graft. Jiro is best done in early spring as it only gets one flush, whereas Fuyu will keep growing most of the summer so we do that later.

Planting Out
Best time to plant out is June or July (early winter). It’s best not to disturb their root system. Keep as much of it together as possible. Dig a hole a lot bigger than the tree, work in a lot of manure or organic matter, a few handfuls of Dynamic Lifter and a heap of lime and dig it all into the soil under the tree. Don’t plant the tree on top of any concentrated fertiliser, don’t ever pour a handful of fertiliser at the base of the persimmon as you will kill it, make a little basin to catch a little water. In spring water a couple of times a week and when you fertilise at this time, put a band out away from the tree and only a very small amount for the first couple of years until they are established – about a couple of handfuls of Dynamic Lifter at a time. If they are in a windy exposed site they won’t establish well. Best to plant in a sheltered position but not too sheltered. In Japan, they plant them bare rooted when they are dormant but if you disturb the roots in a growing time, the tree will 90% of the time, die.

Sheryl:    When I plant a tree, providing it is not root bound, I cut the base of the plastic bag away, place it in the hole then lift the side of the bag up so you are not disturbing the roots.

Member: What are the issues with grafting a Fuyu onto an astringent Nightingale?
Stephen:  You can pretty much graft anything on to any Diospryos kaki (oriental persimmons).  They’re all compatible. There can be incompatibility with the American persimmon (diospyros virginina) which you sometimes see growing on the roadside. It has a small date sized fruit. There’s a native persimmon that grows in the rainforest in Southern Qld. We’re collecting a few different rootstocks from around the world to try, but most of your backyard persimmon is Diospyros kaki the Japanese Persimmon. There’s a bit of variation in growth, but we don’t know a lot about rootstocks as yet, and the industry has a 10 year project which has started and which is pretty much the minimum time to learn anything about rootstocks, although it’s usually 10-20 years to select some rootstocks, graft and evaluate them and try them in different growing conditions.

Sheryl:  If you have both the astringent and the non-astringent planted together in your orchard, will they cross pollinate?
Stephen: If you plant the seed of any persimmon, 97% of the seedlings will be astringent. The non-astringents will get seed in them if you put in a pollinator variety, but we’re not producing pollinator varieties anymore because the industry has stopped using them and we’re going for seedless fruit. Seedless fruit crop OK but can drop if you don’t manage the trees properly – they’ll get very dry. Seeded fruit tends to hang on the tree better.

Nets
We put the nets on at the end of January and we’ll take them off as soon as we take the crop off.  There are advantages to keeping a canopy on as it seems to produce a better environment for the fruit. We get the UV stabilised NZ nets in from James Grigson in South Australia in 100mtr rolls which have a 10 year guarantee but it should last for 15 years. The Chinese ones tend to break down.

Sheryl:     How long will the fruit hang on the tree for and how do we tell when to pick?
Stephen:  We do a sugar test and pick when the brix is over 14. They tend to only colour up well once you get a few cool nights so during the warm February – March nights, the fruit is maturing but not colouring up a lot. They will hang over winter but that is rare in the sub-tropics, but if you go down south in Victoria the tree will lose all its leaves and the tree will be covered in red fruit, so in Melbourne it is very popular as a garden tree. The birds won’t eat them when they are green and astringent. We have to net the trees – there’s no alternative!

Pruning Schedule
To keep your tree to say 3 mtrs or whatever height you want, cut it off in winter.  Prune to an open vase shape but if you want fruit, don’t cut off all of last year’s growth as they fruit on last year’s flush. We espalier our trees. They set very heavy crops so we thin back to one or two fruit i.e., if it sends out a shoot with 8 flowers on, we wait until it sets fruit then take most of them off if it doesn’t do so naturally. Taking the flowers off is ideal but you can’t tell which fruit is misshapen.  If you’re espaliering, I’ll cut off to a less vigorous lateral – you can’t allow them to keep growing out forever and what we are finding is that if you prune too hard, they don’t get enough fruit and they just want to grow all the time so we are looking at ways to crop all the vigorous shoots, take some out and leave some.

I’m not exactly doing a proper espalier on my trees – I’m shifting to cordon training; vertical shoots coming up, crop them for about 3 years, then cut them out and another replacement grows.  So you’ll notice I’ve left some pretty high branches here to crop, and a couple of Fuyu growers have told me that it’s the only way they were able to tame the trees, to load them up with massive clusters of fruit and let them all hang down, but we don’t have that problem with Jiro.

When pruning, if the diameter of the vertical was one-third more than the horizontal sub-leader, you cut it out. I went to NZ a couple of years ago and looked at how they grew them, and they grow them a lot flatter than we do and I think it is probably a better system for controlling vigour.  So this palmette system that I had already put in place by the time I went there probably grows the tree a bit too vertically; and they’ve gone to growing their main tree to a T that sends up big shoots and they bend the shoots over so the tree actually covers the whole orchard in the middle, so it’s just a wall of persimmons and their orchards are very productive.

When we grew our first trees, we planted a single row of trees and decided to open them up into a V and on each side of the V, we would grow an espalier tree.  It’s proved reasonably successful – the only thing is that the net sits a bit low so that’s why you should have a fifth wire when espaliering to make it a bit higher.  The low net keeps humidity in the orchard which exacerbates the problem of rainy weather.  We’ve grown a double trunk, then espaliered a branch onto each wire so we have two leaders, then as the tree grows we try to crop to the outside of the wire and keep the centre fairly open so you get a lot of light into the centre of the tree, which is very important and persimmons initiate next year’s fruit in January.  So this January, next year’s persimmon crop, which we will be picking over 12 months later, was initiated in all these little buds, and they tend to only initiate fruit in the buds that get a lot of light.

We try to look for dapple light on the orchard floor, and if you have a solid blocked out orchard floor under the tree, your canopy is a bit too dense for a commercial orchard.  In a home garden, it is not so critical.  We can get up to 250 fruit per tree.  We don’t wax the fruit for sale – just polish it.

Sheryl: When I was in NZ recently at the Treecroppers Conference, what they said was that you lie down on the ground, look up into the canopy and you must see dappled light.

Fertilise
We fertilise in August (late Winter) just before they flush in spring and also fertilise as soon as we pick the fruit e.g. 1kg of Nitrophoska per tree in Autumn and that builds up the trees reserves for next season.

Ph      Persimmons like a high pH of 6.5+ and you can’t give them too much calcium, so apply dolomite and gypsum.  We do soil testing and leaf testing and try and match the two together to see that what you are putting on the ground is going into the tree. Because I have a variety of soils here and we have high manganese which persimmons don’t particularly like, so the industry is currently revising the standards as the calcium weren’t sufficient and we were getting a lot of fruit quality problems as a result. I work on 5.8 – 7 and that’s with annual lime applications in the winter, and if need be I’ll put on a second application in the summer.  Put on 3kg per tree.  We also put on a large handful of dolomite on each tree in the nursery during winter.  People have told me they’ve planted a tree over some old concrete rubble which is highly alkaline and they’ve done very well.

The trees do best in calcareous soils particularly limestone soils in South Australia.  I’ve been getting my soil tested lately over in WA.  I use to get it done elsewhere and have noticed there is a bit of inaccuracy in all of them.  It’s not a science.  The best idea is not to change your method too much – you look for trends rather than actual figures, so I’ll take a walk through the orchard and take samples from the same place every year so when you hand them to the same lab.  My biggest fruit has been 700gms.

Fruit Drop 
Persimmons will naturally drop a lot of fruit – they might set 600-800 flowers and drop ¾ of them but the things that contribute to fruit drop is poor nutrition, drying out and water logging.  If you get a lot of cloudy weather in spring, it causes carbohydrate stress in the tree and this drops the fruit as well.  Young persimmons are also prone to heavy fruit drop and you’ll see where there are lots of little short stems where there were flowers which haven’t held through to fruiting but as they get older they hold the fruit a bit better.

Fruit Fly 
They’re highly susceptible to fruit fly.  Every roadside within 50kms has guava trees and they should be eradicated, but we control by baiting 2-3 times a week with Lepidex® as the insecticide, mixed with Q-Lure put out by Bugs for Bugs in Mundubbera – yeast autolysate – every other bait I’ve tried doesn’t work.

We spatter spray which means that in an area of a foot square in every few trees, you spray a very course spray with distinct droplets that don’t run together on the leaves or the bait spray won’t work as well. We bait the whole orchard, particularly around the edge of the orchard which gets hammered a bit.  We spray where there’s no fruit.  With the nets on, we often don’t go right through the orchard – just mainly the perimeters  We also spray it on the grass, power poles.  We start baiting mid December so the fruit is about 3-5cm across but the fruit fly seem to be getting hungrier every year.

Propagating
We use Parafilm® from Fernland Agencies in Nambour for grafting.  In the winter when the tree is dormant, we will cut off to the graft which has taken and check them first to see if they are still alive. August you get good sap flow.

Pests
Borers and limb destroyers. There’s a clear wing moth which bores into Persimmons and that’s become a major problem especially with the Fuyu variety.  Jiro doesn’t seem to get affected but I’ve seem them ringbark a tree and kill them.  The industry is controlling it at the moment with pheromone mating disruption so we put out dispensers, and the male can’t find the female to mate with, it’s been very effective.

Diseases 
We have a fungus called Cercospora leaf spot that will take the leaves off the tree, we spray 3 times a year with Mancozeb.  There’s also the yellow peach moth, and the orange fruit borer which will get under the calyx of the fruit starting in Jan/Feb, and they’re a bit of a problem.  We use a product called Mimic, which is one of the new generation of insecticides which tend to be very specific – non-toxic to humans or mammals but highly toxic to little loopers and grubs.  There’s a whole generation of them like the old organo-phosphates on the way out, but some of the new generation pesticides which they call “soft” work well because they don’t create other problems by knocking out all your predators.

Problems 
If you get excessive rainfall you get a gap around the calyx of the fruit and you’ll get a bit of blackening down inside which makes the fruit go soft a bit earlier.

If you see a dark red fruit on the tree today (this is in the Fuyu Block), that will be fruit that has ripened prematurely due to some damage or other.  Often they’ll get calyx separation – they’ll get a lot of rain and blow up and the calyx separates away from the fruit.  Some of them soften because of water logging in the roots which will also cause the fruit to drop.

Sheryl:  How long can we keep Persimmon in the refrigerator? 
Stephen: Try and keep them out of the refrigerator – best is 15ºC for up to 2 weeks.  If you keep them in the refrigerator and pull them out after two weeks, they’ll go soft and jelly like. You can eat them two ways – hard and soft.  Slice them like you would a tomato and put it in a sandwich e.g. ham and salad which is very nice. Persimmon, cheese and avocado plus a bit of tuna is another nice variation. It’s a fruit that goes nice with diary.

Loquats
We put in about 8 different varieties from Birdwood Nursery to experiment with, we’re going to try and thin them to get a bigger fruit, and packing them in punnets.  If they get an early flowering I find it doesn’t come to anything.  We only start to get good fruit from the end of June/July from flowers that come on in late May.  I’m going to prune them to a vase shape and we might tie some branches down.

Avocados
We grow mostly Hass and a few Sharwill and Reed.  Sharwill is probably the best all round avocado for here.  They like lots of organic matter and lots of Dynamic Lifter.  You can fertilise them fairly heavily but just don’t concentrate it.

Don’t plant in clay soil – they need well drained sandy soil or they’ll drown.  They grow well on red sandy soil, well drained, and we prune massive chunks out of them every year with a long handled chain saw and cut out   to ½ out every year.

We also use a plant hormone product called Sunny which we spray on at flowering, that halves your shoot extensive growth and it gives you a bit bigger fruit.  After using it for 3 years, the tree starts to decline healthwise so gave it a break last year.  Only commercial orchards would use a product like this – you wouldn’t worry about it.

On this property are probably some of the 3 oldest Avocado trees in Australia – about 80-100 years old – seedlings planted when this was a pineapple farm and they have survived with no management in all that time, and they are highly prized by Birdwood Nursery as one of their rootstocks.  They pick off 3,000-4,000 fruit off per year for rootstock.

There’s another rootstock I use called Velvick.  Some avocados seem to have a more vigorous rootstock, and some types of avocado have a more vigorous root system which is not exactly resistant to phytophthora, but it regrows quicker so if phytophthora is constantly killing off the roots in the tree, and the tree is constantly growing new ones.  Some do it better than others and these 3 are much healthier trees for resistance to root rot, whereas a lot of avocado trees sold commercially are grown on highly susceptible rootstocks and require a lot of management.  We inject every year with phosphorous acid.

A lot of the seedlings don’t have a very nice flavour so that is why you should buy a grafted tree.

The trees require copper against Anthracnose, and use Endosulphan every 2-3 weeks for fruit spotting bug.  We do a residue test before sending to market which is compulsory before we can start harvesting.  Pesticides are broken down by microflora in the soil.  A healthy soil system is part of your whole lot.  We don’t overfertilise and we encourage organic matter. All the prunings go back under the trees. I’m more worried about Copper. Copper is a fungicide and tends to build up in your soil over time,  we don’t have a viable alternative but Copper would have a more detrimental effect on the soil microflora and the general environment of the orchard.  Copper is toxic to Persimmons unless you use it when they are dormant.  It’s actually a soft pesticide providing you don’t let it get into a creek.

There’s a couple of other pesticides around which you can use, but they tend to be broad spectrum so they tend to knock everything down.  We spray Buldock® for example, it kills all the predatory insects so you get massive mite explosions and all sorts of other problems – scale which you might never have had a problem with before.

Soil
All avocado country on this farm is deep red sandy soil and goes down forever into rocky sandstone.  We grow our best quality Persimmons in heavy clay, but mound them when you’re planting them out in this type of soil.  We manage our organic matter in the soil here by side-throwing the grass slashing, so all our grass row clippings go under the trees.  We also get a lot of winter legumes. We’ve just started experimenting with nitrogen-fixing bacteria and got very good results in the avocados – probably made the persimmons a bit too well.  I get it from Malcolm Foyle at Tanawah and we put it out with Urea 2 or 3 times a year and it fixes nitrogen out of the air.  The only problem with it in a commercial orchard is the difficulty in managing. Nitrogen is potentially lethal for a productive orchard – if you put too much or too little you can do damage, so it’s early days for us but it seems to produce good results.  Avocadoes are heavy nitrogen feeders and I think it has improved the soil health in the first season.

Weeds
We mostly use a product called Spray.Seed® which is one of the Gramoxone types highly toxic to humans, but very effective, and we try and spray before the weeds get too mature.  You use low rates in small dosages and often.  Spray.Seed burns and it only kills what it touches.  It works by burning off the leaf and the young leaves.

Glyphosate is systemic and the roots die as a result, and it won’t kill heavy grasses unless you repeatedly hit it.  We found in horticultural industry that glyphosate requires clay to become inactive, it attaches to clay particles in the soil and until it does, it goes down into the soil and gets taken up by the roots.  If you use it a lot under your orchard, you get tree decline, especially avocados as they have feeder roots.  We never use glyphosate under avocado and try and avoid it in Persimmons too.  If you hit a Persimmon branch with it in autumn, next year that half of the tree will be all deformed – it’s all to do with amine salts as to how it works.

Bob:  I knew a farmer who instead of using 10gms per litre of RoundUp use to use a handful of Urea and half it down to 5 so he got double the strength – it acidifies the water.  It works very effectively if you get your pH down to 3.5 – 4.00.  You can use a quarter of the rate.

Mushroom Compost 
I used it a few years ago around some avocados and nearly killed them.  I think it kept their feet a bit too wet.

Stephen grew up on a fruit and vegetable farm at Woombye, where his parents have grown a whole range of vegetables and subtropical fruits.  In the 1980’s they were one of the early commercial growers of persimmon.  On leaving school Stephen pursued his love of farming and worked on an orchard called Phoolbari Park at Palmwoods, learning to grow Avocados, Stonefruit, Custard Apple and Persimmons.  It was here he also became involved in the nursery industry, becoming a partner in Phoolbari Park Nurseries, a leading supplier of persimmon trees to commercial growers.  Currently he manages Pringle Road Farms, runs Fruitscapes Nursery (specialising in persimmon trees) and in partnership with brother Jon owns the retail outlet Yandina Fruit Market. 
Note from Sheryl: Stephen is President of Persimmons Australia Inc. Contact:  email: auspersimmon@yahoo.com.au     (M) 0408 769 987

This article was compiled by Sheryl Backhouse

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Club members visited a strawberry farm using a hydroponic method. The strawberries are grown in black plastic bags filled with potting mix, on a raised wooden frame. Hydroponic mixture is dripped into the bags.

Stephen  We started to grow strawberries in the ground a number of years ago but once I saw an article on growing them hydroponically, it seemed like a time efficient system for our busy lifestyle. With this system you can pick all day long and at the end of the day, you might be sick of picking but you’re not tired so for me the fact that you don’t have to bend over apart from anything else far outweighs growing them in the ground. The system we’ve got here doesn’t suit Joy. We also grew Sugarbaby and Karbarla but some people find Sugarbaby a bit watery. We pick 3 times a week. I would consider growing Karbarla next year because you can grow these at the start of the year when the prices are high. We had a bit of a nutrient deficiency at the start of the year and going by a Consultant’s advice, I gave them a foliar fertiliser and got spray burn over most of the crop. 

Sheryl     Where did you get your technology from?

Stephen   I got it from Ralph King and Brian Biddle from Petersen St. Morayfield. I think Ralph was the originator of the idea.

Sheryl     Did you have to buy this technology?

Stephen   No, I went to see him and asked him all about it and he tried to put me off.

Sheryl      If they’re getting the same amount of water and nutrients, why the varying sizes of fruit?

Stephen   Each plant may be at a slightly different stage of growth depending on how good it was as a runner and how strong it is individually as a plant and other varying conditions – perhaps it’s been attacked by something. When we buy the plant off the grower the strawberry will start off with one crown and each time you get new growth you get another crown then another so for each crown you get another hand of strawberries. The first strawberry off is the biggest, then they go down in size with each new strawberry. Two weeks ago we started off with big fruit, we’re now down to large fruit and it will proceed down to small as the plant goes through each stage of growth so when we finish in November, we’ll finish with a lot of very small strawberries. At the end of the season, we’ll pull them all out and replant with new runners at the start of the following season. Another farmer grows zucchinis in his bags.

Tino         What’s the yield like compared with an in-ground situation?

Stephen    It should be the same but I haven’t achieved the yields that in-ground farmers have achieved and that is something I am working on but as this is only a hobby and I’m away working, I don’t get to manage it as I should.

Irrigation  

When the water goes from the dam through the filter from the tank to the injectors, A & B mix through an automatic injector valve, through a timer and out to the farm. I don’t have to check on it all that much. A is calcium-nitrate and iron and B is potassium nitrate and sulphur and I get this mix through Grow Force. I’ve found they seem to have fertilisers that work better for the hydroponic system.  The water goes through 3 sand filters that I made myself – they’re not used by a lot of people. The farmer up at Morayfield chlorinates his dam water but I hated the idea of using chlorine. The water goes through very slowly – slower than gravity – living in the sand are micro-organisms that eat the pathogens in the water. By the time this water gets through these 3 filters and goes into the tank, it’s clean – I haven’t had any death from disease. At this time of the year I water them 7 times a day for six minutes and at the end of the year it will be up to 12 times a day for 12 minute intervals. I haven’t had a problem with salts but the way I work out whether I need to irrigate more is I collect the water from underneath the bags. We get an electro-conductivity meter that measures the amount of salts in the water – the salts are the fertiliser. When the water leaves the shed it is 1.3 on the scale. When the water in the containers goes up to 1.7 or 1.8 I increase the water because what that means is that the plant is using more water than nutrient. You don’t use a lot of water using this system.

Sheryl    In the home situation we wouldn’t be able to use this system.

Stephen  Just use tap water. The chaps at Morayfield use town water but I have a far more complicated system.

Sheryl      Do you use any foliar fertilisers at all?

Stephen   In the last month I’ve started to use Seaweed spray and it apparently helps to keep fungus diseases at bay.

Sheryl      Have you done any control tests to check this?

Stephen   No, I try and only use 1 or 2 experiments each year so I don’t get mixed up with how many things I’m doing. I run a trickle tape through the bags and the nutrient I use I mix up myself – it’s suppose to be the same chemical composition as what’s in the plant. The plant will draw out of the water ie if the plant is using more nitrogen or potassium etc. it will absorb that nutrient out of the water; it won’t become toxic but it’s enough for the plant to respond to.

Member   At regular intervals?

Stephen   All during the day but I might do one irrigation at midnight in a month’s time. They use a lot of water during windy weather.

Sheryl      How many litres an hour/day do these sand filters handle?

Stephen  100 litres per hour per filter. I use 4500 litres per day at the absolute peak of the season. Sheryl      Any reason for the 3 filters? ie why not 2 or 4?

Stephen    I’ll be adding another filter shortly when I put in more strawberries.

Sheryl      You also have overhead sprinklers – are these to control frost?

Stephen    No, we generally don’t get frost. They’re to start the strawberries off at the beginning of the season. When you buy them bare-rooted in a box of a thousand, we trim them up and put them in the wetted potting mix in the bags and the overhead irrigation just cools the area down. The black plastic is really hot when it’s 35º so it just works as a mister.

Sheryl      How do you control the sweetness in your strawberries?

Stephen  The sweetness is genetics. I use Camarosa plus the fact that the plants get everything they want under ideal conditions so they’re not stressed. I experiment quite a bit – some things work and others don’t. There’s another variety called Chandler that’s supposed to be good but I’ve heard that they’re soft and don’t travel well. Next year we’re thinking of growing an early variety called Cabala. It’s an interesting hobby for me. There’s not a lot of money in strawberries so you have to get your system right. The DPI are interested in this system and we’re trialling some of their varieties.

Potting Mix and Bags

I use Native Mix from Envirogreen at Stapleton and we bag them ourselves. At the start of the year we have to wet up the bags. We use black UV resistant plastic bags from Dabron at Seventeen Mile Rocks. I’ve experimented quite a bit – we use 6 plants per bag and it doesn’t seem to matter how squashed in they are, they’re still getting all the nutrient they want. If you have them spread out, there’s less chance of disease. What I’ve found is that we get just as many fruit off the strawberries further apart as what we do when they’re jammed up. We’ve had these bags now for 3 years. I haven’t had to change the potting mix – all we do at the end of the year is spray a herbicide onto the strawberries and kill them off which we do around November so for the rest of the year we don’t have to do anything. When we killed them off halfway through November last year, there was another flush coming on and it was tempting to keep going but with the heat coming on I thought enough is enough! In-ground farmers, as soon as the strawberries have finished, have to start preparing for the following year and they have a lot of work to do in the off season whereas I don’t have any work really until I have to plant out again in April. Generally I just knock the bush out of the way or pull it out and replant.

Bruce     We could do this in the home garden then plant something underneath

Sheryl    Why don’t you use your own runners?

Stephen  They’re protected under PBR. We can cut them off and let them go again but I haven’t heard of too many guys who’ve had much success with this.

Sheryl    The theory being that if you keep strawberries in the same patch year in year out, then you will get disease?

Stephen  I don’t know why I don’t. I’ve asked this question of other farmers who are using this method. In-ground farmers have to fumigate their soil with methyl bromide but it’s being phased out by 2005 I believe. I’ve never found nematodes in my potting mix but this year I found the white curl grub (Longicon?). The DPI spray with Dichlorophos which is like a termite killer at the start of the year then turn the soil over.

Tino        We use a couple of sprays of Captan for mould – there’s only a one day withholding period.

Stephen   Strawberries usually suffer from black spot or grey mould.

Trays

Putting the trickle irrigation through the bags is a really messy job so I experimented with plastic trays and put the trickle irrigation over the trays but when we get rain the water sits on top of the plastic and the strawberries lay in it. I just use top hat section that you use on a steel frame shed and just lay the bags on top.

Pests

To keep the caterpillars at bay I put in a BugEater – it’s a UV light which has an airstream that pushes the moths into a tray of water below and I add in a bit of detergent to the water. In September we had a massive increase in moths, and I noticed that we also had a huge build-up of fruit flies at the same so instead of emptying the tray after at the end of each week, I’m having to do it nightly. I also use Dipel on a weekly basis which is a biological spray to counteract the caterpillars which when they eat the leaves, it gets into their gut and kills them off, and I’ve found it to be really effective.

Tino   Do you use predators? They’re excellent for 2 spotted mites. I use a fellow named Jones up at Caloundra but the mites have to be on the plant in order to use the bugs.

Stephen   No, but I might try them in the future.

Fruit Fly   Camerosa don’t have the same problem with Spotted Mite but some other varieties do.

Possums  

When I put a gnome out for 3 or 4 days, the possum wouldn’t go onto the plants but now he says it’s only a gnome so I now have to look for something else! We have a bit of a problem but he only eats from this first row along to about 3 m. So I’m thinking of putting in an electric fence and keeping the dogs inside the enclosure at night. We have Golden Retrievers and West Highland Terriers. The Retrievers wouldn’t be any good because they’d just jump up and eat the strawberries too!

Sheryl   Just put up a long metal sleeve on your posts so they can’t get their claws into it – just like the electricity poles. If you fence and put the dogs in, they’ll bark all night at the possums trying to get in and nobody will get any sleep!

Article compiled by Sheryl Backhouse

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The farm was set up in 1997 by Gary Mazzorana. Cut Leaf Mint was previously grown on the flat plateau –  however the main native food crops are now Lemon Myrtle and Aniseed Myrtle. Davidson Plums (the NSW variety) were also grown – however they were difficult to manage due to fruit fly. Next door is an organic banana farm and we have a few custard apples, jaboticaba and a Blue Almond and they taste somewhere between a Macadamia and a Cashew and they have a beautiful blue shell.

Backhousia citriodora

This variety (Line A) has red tips during winter which has no effect on the plant whatsoever. Line B has a larger leaf and the Limpinwood variety has a higher biomass ratio. All plants were all artificially propagated (tip cuttings) and they have the same chemical composition, which is important for uniform end products. The germination rate of lemon myrtle seed is only about 2%.

Sheryl Where did the original plants come from?

Sibylla They came from ornamental stock because there was very little data available as far as chemical composition from wild stock and that only happened in 1996.

Sheryl Were you looking for high oil content?  

Sibylla Not necessarily, although we do look for high oil content up to 2.5%(w/w), we focus on the main constituents Citral (Neral and Geranial) up to 97%, but the minor constituents were important too. This type is high oil yielding and a high citral variety. It is also very sweet, perfect for any food flavouring. The other has a saponin and is perfect for cosmetic products.

Sheryl So they are all classified as Backhousia citriodora?

Sibylla Yes – it’s just a different gene pool and as you can see there is a much higher biomass in this tree than the other one and very little timber so they are ideal for a herb/tea/spice or nutraceutical product. We are totally anti-spray and these trees have never been chemically treated and they are absolutely perfect as they are.

Sheryl One type had more of a red tip in winter than the other.

Sibylla Yes, Type A gets really red and the young shoots get brown just before turning red.

To be viable you need two harvesters – one for oil and the other for leaf.

Sheryl What time of the day do they harvest?

Sibylla Anytime, it doesn’t make that much difference.

Sheryl Have you done testing on that?

Sibylla Yes.

Sheryl The reason I ask is that they have discovered with lavender the best time to harvest is after 8pm at night to get a higher oil content.

Sibylla They are going for a high oil yield but our main product line is spice so we’ve tested the potential variation of leaf harvested from top/bottom, northside, southside, inside and outside and found no significant difference. What one is looking for is minimal variation in the end product, apart from seasonal variation we have minimal variation over many years in our products.

Sheryl What time of the year do you harvest?

Sibylla All year round. We have three markets: one is for foliage for the flower industry; one is spice and then to keep the orchard in good management, we harvest for oil so they are maintained for optimum growth.

Sheryl Do you export the cut foliage?

Sibylla No, just local.

Another crop growing on this property is anisata (Anetholea anisata) previously called Backhousia anisata and you can find that it is more prone to insects like scale and psyllid. The early flush shows red tips which are prone to be attacked by psyllid, however with careful management and regular cuttings one can avoid breeding the pest. These trees are only 2-3 years old, they were difficult to establish in these years of drought.

Sheryl Do you have underground irrigation? 

Sibylla Gary has just put in drip irrigation but it hasn’t been used. We did go for no irrigation but with the two droughts, the anisata suffers the most especially when they’re young.

Sibylla These trees are a very high trans-E-anethole variety. We have eliminated all methyl chavicol varieties as the trans-E-anethole is the customers preferred choice. The tree does not perform uniformly to start with; some trees will be in flush while others will show a perfect maturity, ready for cutting. The flushing trees are unsuitable to be cut and you can see here some rows look uniform. The repeated cutting is like toilet training to the tree. They all come on at once when you cut them at the same time. Occasionally you’ll get a tree that is flushing and it may be that that particular tree was used for propagation material so it is out of the cycle with the other trees. The trees are planted about 1 to 1.2 metres apart.

Article compiled by Sheryl Backhouse

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We bought this place about 9 years ago in 1997 – 60 acres or nearly 25 hectares. We’re surrounded by Macadamias and forest. The property was originally pine trees and when they were harvested they left the stumps so we go down a hole every so often. It was also a turf farm prior to when we purchased it and we planted the Avocadoes at various stages. We haven’t topped them as yet but it will happen to retain the view of Maleny and we’ve been organic right from the start. I’m in Biological Farmers which has an offshoot called Australian Certified Organic and we get audited each year so I’ve just certified the middle section with the avocadoes on – not the paddock with the cattle. It’s too hard to control ticks, buffalo fly etc. organically. I also grow 150 bananas but I’m building this up.

Pests and Diseases

We’ve had a lot of trouble with Phytophthora particularly when the trees were young even on this well-drained soil but once the trees get to 3-4 years, you might get small outbreaks but you usually don’t get lethal doses. We treated the Phytophthora just by mulching. 3 years into it, I started to use Trichoderma “Trichoshield” which is a product put out by Nutritech at Yandina. It’s not approved by BFA but you can get permission. The reason is that it is made in India and they haven’t certified the factory there. It controls it to a certain extent but you can see I have 2 trees suffering still.

Sheryl How much, how often and when? 

Ross Once a year in August/September just before the spring flush. I buy a kilo and it does the whole orchard and any tree that is suffering a bit, I’ll give it a bit extra. It’s a powder that you dissolve in water then spray the ground. Do it on a wet day or after you irrigate.

Kelly Did you choose Phytophthora resistant rootstock when you bought the trees?

Ross Yes I used trees on Velvic rootstock. I didn’t spray for the 1st three years and I had about 10% loss. ’99 was a really wet winter and that knocked them around so I lost a number of them that year. I have 238 trees but I’m down to 208. The trees that are affected I spray them every 2 months.

Sheryl  Phytophthora affected trees can be recognised by their much lighter colour – they don’t have the dark green leaves.

Ross They also lose their foliage. Over winter, you get recycling of foliage but the affected ones almost defoliate completely. It affects the new roots. We get the monolepta beetle and they swarm in the hot summer months. They breed in the bush and they defoliate the young tips and they also get on the young fruit. They don’t do much damage but it just looks bad which means I can’t sell those fruit as 1st grade. They put a scaly mark on the fruit. The year before we had really bad infestations and I sprayed with pyrethrum which is an allowable input. I try not to spray because I think pyrethrum is not selective so it’ll take out the good insects as well so I just did it when I saw the swarming monolepta. Up to this year, we’d get 10-15% fruit spotting bug damage. I can sell the fruit if there’s only 1-2 marks on them but this year, we’ve had 25-30% damage but it’s been a really big crop this year. For the first time this year, we got fruit fly damage; they went in where the fruit spotting bug hit so we got a fruit drop in Feb/Mar. These are the hard lumps. People want organic but they don’t want lumps either! I don’t do anything about fruit spotting bug or fruit fly. I had thought this year of putting traps around.

Sheryl Patrick Nugent looks after an organic avocado farm up at Blackbutt and he’ll be able to tell you all about it.

Ross There are two main outlets for organics: Eco Farms and United Organics and they’re both down at the Brisbane Markets but I tend to sell locally at the Natural Food Store near Buderim.

Sheryl How much extra would you get selling organically?

Ross In recent years people were getting $1.00 per kg and I’d get $3.00 but this year I’m getting $3.50kg for top quality and seconds and smalls $1-$2 kg.

Member Does it pay to go organic for you?

Ross I think my costs are pretty minimal. If you had to use phosphorus acid your costs would be fairly high.

Fertiliser

I also give them composted chicken manure and in the compost I also put in banana stems, cow manure, weeds and vegetable scraps (sometimes). I spread the fertiliser twice a year when they were young but it’s now down to once a year.

Sheryl So, you can get organic chicken manure?

Ross No, but it’s allowable as long as it is composted and I also spray it with the microbes. The chicken manure comes from Macdougalls at Chevallum and the company stores it in big heaps and turns it every so often so they call it composted and it’s reasonably broken down.

Sheryl How do you feel the microbes are going here?

Ross I’ve only been using them a very short time so I’m not really sure. Les Nichol a vegetable grower under BFA certification has been using them for a while and he’s having really good results and his soil fertility looks great. I also went to a 3 day biodynamic workshop last year but I haven’t taken it up whole-heartedly but I am interested in some of the concepts. I’d like to learn more about it.

Sheryl Talk to Terry Little, Peter Sauer, Col Metcalf or John Hatch. I also put on gypsum every year too – 1-2kg per tree just before the spring flush. That’s mainly for calcium – it’s certainly not for improving drainage in the soil which is what gypsum is often used for but it’s an allowable as well.

Peter What type of gypsum do you use?

Ross  Natural gypsum marketed by QLD Organics. 

Bananas

Sheryl  One of our members has bananas that are so high up that it’s precarious trying to bag the bunch.

Ross I use a ladder but I’d like to find out too. If you plant them too close, they tend to grow tall and the bunches can be small – space them out at say 3x4mtr or more.

Avocadoes

Sheryl  How do you pick your avocadoes up high?

Ross  I climb the tree! 

Sheryl  When I was in Sydney I bought a fruit harvester and got Bob to attach it to a swimming pool extension handle and it worked extremely well in hooking avocadoes high in the tree. If you want one, it comes from Magnamail Q474 Fruit Harvester $12.90  www.magnamail.com.au or ring them on 1800 251 252  Showrooms at 2 William Street Brookvale NSW  9am to 4.30pm Monday to Friday Opposite Warringah Mall.  Shop 25, Kiora Mall, 29 Kiora Road, Miranda NSW  9am to 5pm Monday to Friday   8.30am to 12.00pm Saturday. 

Row Cropping

Ross  I planted a shrub legume mainly Leucaena leucocephala – there are other species as well.

Sheryl Isn’t it classified as a weed?

Ross Yes, a lot of people think it is a weed but so are pine trees! Those 4 trees are my seed production block and I’ve let them grow – it will grow into a tree about 10-15 mtrs high but I just keep cutting it back to keep it for the seed and the ones in the orchard I cut back. It’s mainly grown for cattle fodder; high protein content and cattle really like it but so do wallabies and hares so I had to fence it off. Another one I planted was Sesbania which you might find a better species in terms of its available nitrogen content of the leaf and more rapid breakdown of the foliage to provide that nitrogen source. As you can see, I planted the Leucaena between each Avocado tree but now the Avocados are shading the tree legume so the productivity of the amount of material I’m getting from the legume trees is gradually declining and some of them have died right out because they have been completely shaded and they are not shade tolerant so now I have to think of alternatives so I might have to plant a block somewhere which I can cut and bring back to the trees. What I could have done was plant a row down the middle between each row of avocadoes and then you cut with a forage harvester but I suppose why I did it this way is that I didn’t have much material at the time but in hindsight you could do that if you had enough material. It might take a while for the avocadoes to take up the nitrogen in the soil if they are further apart. Most of the nitrogen input you’re going to get from the foliage.

Member That Leucaena is not a nitrogen fixer with nodules – it’s the leaf that you just let rot?

Ross The nitrogen that goes into the leaf is fixed by the nodules so every time I cut it, those nodules get shed so the tree gets stressed so there’s nitrogen going in where the roots of the trees are but also the nitrogen that’s being fixed in the leaf and I throw that material under the avocadoes so you’re getting sources from both.

John Stocking rates in cattle – how does Leucaena compare with kikuyu?

Ross Central Qld is the main area where they grow Leucaena for cattle feed and in comparison, it’s probably double the stocking rate and a third again in production in terms of liveweight gain.  They regularly get 1kg per head per day with Leucaena.

Sheryl I’ve got an article at home that says you can get 2kg a day with Chicory.

Member Do horses like it?

Ross No, because it’s got mimosine in it – only ruminants can utilize it. Non ruminants like pigs, chickens, horses should not use it as there’s an alkaloid in it that causes hair dropping. The Thais eat it in salad but you should only eat a little bit.

Member  So that’s why men go bald – from eating salad!!

Gretchen Why didn’t you use Pigeon Pea?

Ross They’ll only last about 3-4 years and that’s also the problem with Sesbania. You could use Acacias the same way – Acacia  cunninghamii I tried at University experimentally but the problem with Acacia is that it doesn’t break down very rapidly and what happened was you actually used nitrogen from the soil to break the acacia leaf down whereas this gives nitrogen back to the system so that was the problem with the philodinous acacias like black wattle with the big thick leaves. I don’t think we tried any with the compound leaf. 

Kelly Our local Landcare Nursery at Maleny do have some that are indigenous species but they might be hit by the local bug.

Sheryl  Has anyone else experimented with any other nitrogen fixing plants? We had an article on Lab Lab some years ago. 

Peter B  Pigeon Peas drop their own seed and up they come. King Parrots also love the seed.

Sheryl  How thick do you put your mulch on? 

Ross  10-15cm.

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I must admit I have a problem with certain magazines – people write articles, the readers go out and do what is suggested and it doesn’t work. We’ve been here around 20 years – when we first came here the idea was to have a bit of everything that we thought would grow in the area mainly to feed ourselves but if there was a bit of surplus left to sell or process then that would be good. I suppose over the time we started out like a lot of other people when they first hear about all these wonderful unobtainable things. You spend half your life and half your savings and put them in and they either die, or worse than that, they probably fruit and taste like nothing, so you then spend 5 years trying to dig them out. We’ve just recently rediscovered wine making and have found that anything is palatable if you turn it into alcohol, so now we think that some of those things we were going to get rid of, we might just leave them!

We had a major set-back 6 years ago when the house we had been owner-building for 14 years burnt to the ground. That took maps, information, books and all sorts of things including rain records for 14 years. So we’re only now just starting to get back on top of things. We moved back in 12 months after the fire. We didn’t have a lot of windows, no internal linings, only some doors. We then decided we needed some WWOOFers (willing workers on organic farms). Over the last 4 years we’ve had about 140.

Eighteen months after the fire when we went around having a look at some of the fruit trees there was a block of mangoes which I had planted just prior to the fire, every single one had been ringbarked by rock wallabies. I think there was about 40 different rare mangoes so I lost interest in things for a little bit – I think I saved 2. We’re now back on the final stage of our rebirth and we’re getting back into livestock so we now have a few different breeds of chickens. Even after 20 years we don’t have all the answers – there are still a lot of questions – your combined knowledge here is more than mine will ever be so hopefully you’ll be able to tell me a few things today – pleasantly I hope!  We used to have a lot of bracken and ageratum but by improving the soil with lime and dolomite we got rid of it.

We have 3 cows and produce our own milk and they calve every year usually which gives a regular supply of beef – we have a couple of sheep and lambs and we seasonally buy a 6 week old pig and have that for Christmas but the shed is in dire need of repair so we didn’t get a pig this year. We get in a load of sawdust and lock up the sheep at night.  Sheep and goats are particularly susceptible to intestinal worms on the North Coast because of the high temperature and high rainfall so it also reduces the pasture contamination. Once a month we scrape all that up and add some shredded cow manure, chicken litter and put it in the first compost heap. We build one, a week later it gets turned into the middle and a week later, it gets turned back over again and two weeks later we use it. From start to finish is 4 weeks so those English books that tell you that you need 12 months for your compost to mature are not true.

The trees get a bucket full every time we go around. We use it fairly fresh around the fruit trees, a little more ‘aged’ in the vegetable beds which are pure compost. A lot of research has shown that compost is most active when its just finished – when you leave it lying there, you might get earthworms moving into it but its lost a lot of its goodness. There’s beneficial fungi and microbes in there so if you left it for a while, they would probably die out.

Sheryl Any footrot in this area? Phil No we have Suffolk and they seem to be fairly immune to footrot and they’re apparently the best eating.

 We’ve decided to go into organic egg production because we’ve now got onto some good organic feed and we have just got 2 dozen day old chickens and that will be the nitrogen booster for the compost. The brown ones are a commercial one called Lohman, they spend their entire life laying eggs and not eating very much. The white ones are an old-fashioned type called Light Sussex and we put an Indian Game male over a light Sussex female to breed our own meat chickens. Commercial meat chickens are 6 weeks old when they are despatched to KFC. We also have silverlaced Wyandotte and by using a Brown Leghorn rooster over a Silverlaced Wyandotte hen at day old the males and females are different colours so you can get rid of all the males at birth. Use a Gold over a Silver – doesn’t matter what they are and sex them at a day old. Our feed comes from Aus Organics west of Toowoomba.

On the coolest part of the property we planted Nashi, Sub-Tropical Plums and a few varieties of Apples – Anna, Einshiener, Golden Dorset, Tropic Beauty. We have an Apricot because you never know, they might actually be wrong about global warming and we might head to another ice age and I’ll be the only person on the Tweed with apricots!  If you haven’t planted an Ice Cream Bean then I suggest you don’t – they’re a noxious weed. Good for mulch but impossible to get rid of! If your fruit tree doesn’t crop, you hear Nurserymen say you need another for cross-pollination but I think some trees just take 3 years to crop or so.

George I have a Cherry of the Rio Grande that flowers like mad but probably only 2% actually fruit.

Phil  I’ve always liked the idea of a soil test but I’ve never liked the price so I probably spent the first 15 years just doing what people said I should be doing in organic gardening and permaculture magazines.  When you are given a fertilizer guide and it says that you should be adding 100 gms of this or that to your Mangoes in September, it always assumes that the condition of the soil is universal around the world and that’s what they need but we know it’s not, so 3 years ago I decided to get some soil tests done  – I tested the pH myself with a popular home test kit myself but the tests came back differently.

Sheryl There is no world standard in soil testing – I discovered this because we have a friend who is in this field and he discovered this because clients would send off the same soil samples to different laboratories and they would return different results and the machine he works on cost $400,000!

Phil We decided to go with Tony de Vere from Brookside Laboratories at Highfields which is just past Toowoomba – costs $77.00 per sample – he then sends them to America where they are analysed using the Albrecht method which is the latest ‘in thing’ and as I understand, Albrecht was around in the 40’s and 50’s in America and he was another of those people who were ignored in his time. What he did was take different samples of soils, put them in a centrifuge, and flung everything out so all he was left with was soil and he then started to add things to them until he found an ideal growing medium and he came up with a formula which he calls base saturation and basically you’ve got things in percentages so it should be 68% calcium 12% magnesium 5% potassium etc.  Albrecht says that everything will grow at 6.3 so there is none of these Blueberries need a pH of 4 and Olives need 7. Everything is in balance so when you read magazines that say you should put 4 tonne of lime or somebody else says you need 2 tonne of dolomite – lime has only got calcium in it and dolomite has calcium and magnesium and if you don’t know what you want, then you’re wasting your time.

The figures that come back from Brookside Labs are just a jumble of figures to me but fortunately there’s a lovely company called Nutritech on the Sunshine Coast that take those figures and at no cost to you interpret the results. I tested the soil where I grow Persimmons in Nov. 2000 and it was way too low on everything – Nutritech give you a star rating and it was one and a half stars and the standard goes up to five so it was poor.  I’d done all the things that people had told me to do – I’d applied mulch and compost and years ago I used pelletised chook pellets so I used some of Nutritech’s products and some other things which were acceptable for an organic farm as not all of their products are (we are certified Organic with NASAA and have been since 1995) so this year we had another test done and everything is up in the medium range where it should be and now they’ve given us a wonderful 4 star rating so if Albrecht is the be all and end all, then we’re pretty close to where we should be.

We’re now looking at what we’re short of and that is Nitrogen and Potassium and they’re a bit hard to get organically – it’s alright for those of you who aren’t as you can chuck out a bag of Urea and I think that Urea is a wonderful product in that it is pure (unlike pelletised chicken pellets that could have growth hormones, antibiotics and goodness knows what else in them). You can stabilize Urea just by composting it with sawdust and this would be a nice source of Nitrogen for you if you don’t grow organically. We can use blood meal, fishmeal and a few other things but they’re very low in Nitrogen. With Potassium we can use Potassium Sulphate but preferably not directly on the ground so we compost it. It’s acceptable under organic standards but there are limitations to the amount you use and whether a soil test tells you that you need it. If you don’t need Sulphur, then you wouldn’t use Potassium Sulphate. I think the best value and source of Potassium is actually molasses as its nice and cheap but we can’t use it directly as it’s not organic but we do put it through our compost heap.

The other things we’re short of are Manganese, Copper, Zinc and Boron so I’ve bought those in a pure form and because my roots are mathematical and not esoterical like the bio-dynamic people, I’ve scaled it back to what a tree needs and how much to put in the compost so theoretically my compost is balanced which is what the plants need, whereas in the past with pelletised chook poo and compost, when the results originally came back, the phosphorus was almost off the scale and the plants don’t use it – there was no nitrogen and no potassium. Our phosphorus is slowing coming back to what it should be.

Just recently I read a suggestion that organic matter has a more important role in nutrient uptake and nutrition of plants than actually what is there and we’ve always had incredible organic matter levels – betwen 7 and 10%. Organic matter is a big buffer so that if there are excesses or deficiencies then that buffers it a bit – it also holds the moisture in there and keeps the weeds down. One of the first pH tests we had done on some Mandarins came back with a reading of 4.05 and the guy from the lab rang me up and said that he’d never seen any soil with a reading that low and the Mandarins would die within a week if we planted them without liming. This was originally old banana country and bananas and sugar cane are basically grown hydroponically – the soil’s just there to provide a medium for the roots to grow in and it’s jut a matter of applying a water soluble nutrient which I why conventionally grown bananas have no taste.

The other thing we’ve just into is Compost Tea  – I’d like to have it tested but its $240.00 to do the full bacteria/fungi growth etc. The more you read about it the less they seem to be telling you about how to do it! Basically all I’ve got is an aquarium aerator I borrowed, half a dozen airstones which were 80 cents each and the stainless steel drum I picked up that someone had put out on their footpath for one of those clean-up days, I asked the guy and he said he had used to use it to make yoghurt and no longer needed it. Basically we have a Hessian bag of compost suspended in there with a little Molasses, Fish Emulsion, Seaweed and Humic Acid and it’s aerating nicely and after 3 days we put it out around the trees.

People who are writing articles are usually salesmen and they tell us the wonders of rock dust, zeolite, compost enhancers etc. and I don’t dispute that the things they are saying are true but I rang up a guy about a compost inoculant and said that I already make compost what would the benefits be? He said that it was to put the bacteria in and I said that it would probably already be in there anyway, and he said, oh no, so I asked him what he was composting and he said sawdust and urea and they are two sterile materials – there’s no life in them so of course in this situation you would benefit from a bacterial input. CSIRO put out a little book on composting and they said that if it is working properly, then adding activators is like adding a grain of sand to a rock slide.

The most successful thing we’ve had that grows really well here is Coffee – last year we harvested about 100kgs – this year it’s been atrocious because it’s been so hot and dry and we’ll be lucky if we get 30-40 kgs. Hand harvested coffee will always hold its price so we’re not talking about what goes into Nescafe or Bushells. Basically there’s two types of Coffee – Arabica which is the gourmet coffee and Robusta and it’s called Robusta because its robust and tastes like mud! It’s usually machine harvested or in Third World countries they’re still hand harvesting it. Good Arabica grows on good soil is hand harvested at its prime and it needs to be picked and processed very quickly which we do and once you’ve got it to the dry bean stage you can pretty much keep it indefinitely. Once you’ve done that you have to roast it and most people say you have to consume it within 24 hours so at the supermarket it’s probably been there for 3 months so I don’t think it’s worth the spending your money on!

Coffee grown in this area is naturally low in caffeine. Coffee grows true to type from seed and there’s very little variation between them so there’s no use going in and finding the best tree as it’s all pot luck. There was a lot of coffee grown around here in the old days – ours comes from the local school. There’s a guy in the Dept. of Ag who is really pushing coffee in this area. I’ve just planted two new named varieties – one is supposed to be dwarf – trouble with coffee is that it gets 4 metres tall – we’ve tried pruning and it just suckers and the side branches just keep going out – they only crop on the ends – you can’t kill a coffee tree (one of our Fruit Club members did!)  We had a wwoofer who had dug out a tree (thinking it was lantana) so when I found it I just put it back in the ground and it grew again! If you put a coffee tree through your shredder and it has beans on it then where they land on the ground, it’ll grow!

George What about the variety where all the beans ripen together? Phil I’m not sure that that is possible; I’ve just planted some of the new commercial varieties.  In fact I’m thinking of getting my wwoofers to dig the trees up, bring the plants back to the house, pick the beans off, then they can take it back up the hill and replant!!!! This method would restrict next seasons growth, we could prune the top off for a bit of mulch as well as doing a bit of root pruning!!!

Sheryl Do you have a small roasting machine? Phil Yes I do and we also have a hulling machine.  A roaster that will do around 250gms of coffee is worth around a $1000.00 and 250gms of coffee will last you 10 minutes – no – 3 days! There is an organic roaster in Brisbane. I use old popcorn machines which you can get in garage sales for $5.00 and I then add a bakebean/spaggetti tin on top so for $10.00 I roast 280 gms of coffee and it takes between 8 and 10 minutes depending on whether it’s summer or winter. I know what colour coffee I like so when the colour is right then I tip it out. Put a wedge at the rear of the machine (coffee beans are heavier than popcorn so that’s why you have to get the airflow going so what happens when you put it on an angle it actually flips it over the top so once the coffee starts roasting then it gets a little bit lighter and you get some air in there, you get it popping like popcorn. When it’s the colour you want, tip it out onto a tray and dunk the tray only into some water (don’t wet the beans) as it’s critical that you cool the coffee as soon as you can after because if you leave it, it is still roasting and it starts developing the off flavours – if you want mild, then do it only 5 minutes – Turkish you would leave it in for half an hour until it’s black and smoking! I’m thinking of patenting these popcorn machines!! Then once you have cooled it down, you need to grind it and drink it as soon as possible. The problem with using a conventional oven is the movement. The problem with using a rotisserie is that you cannot see inside.  Somebody was telling me he used a BBQ rotisserie but it was taking him half an hour.

George Somebody was just telling me that they use their microwave. Phil Here’s some coffee we picked 3 days ago which we put into a bucket of water and ferments and we leave it there for a week or two. We wait until the slime/mucilage has gone from the outside of the bean, then stick them out on the rack – that’s the green bean stage – and at that stage you can more or less store them indefinitely. Connoisseurs tell us that 12 months after it’s picked if you roast your coffee then that it’s coffee at its best. It must be true because somebody said it was!  George Have you tried putting an aerator in there too? Phil No, I haven’t. Peter You can leave the beans in there too long can’t you? Phil I’m sure there’s a critical time length but …I then put them out onto shade cloth which I have on an old wire bed to dry in the sun and I just hose them down again. The final stage which is the most difficult one and another expensive machine is taking the parchment off  so you then end up with a tiny little bean which when roasted puffs up one and a half times its size. I use a Kenwood Chef with a mincer attachment and just take the cutting blade out – basically the commercial ones work on a corkscrew and they rub against each other – chaff comes out one way and the beans come out the other way. If you have a liquidiser with a plastic blade which are impossible to get these days, then you could do it with that. Whoever the first person was to process coffee and got a drink out of it, I don’t know why they would be doing what they did! Sheryl When you’re storing them; do you add anything that takes up the moisture? Phil No, I just store them in hessian sacks underneath the house – they will take on and release moisture so before we put it through the hulling machine, we’ll put it out to dry for another day.

Lindy  We grow Fuyu Persimmons – 2 years ago we bagged them and did really well, last year the birds realised what was in the bags and the crows ate a good third of them and this year we’ve made nets for them. Phil  In the early days I believed everything I read  and people told me that you needed more than one variety because they needed a cross-pollinator and we did that and then I read that if you had cross-pollination, they were more likely to produce seeds so in the last couple of years we found they were getting more and more seeds in them so the ones I knew that were not Fuyu I’ve taken out and moved somewhere else during their dormancy – you can’t kill a Persimmon tree. I moved them a long way away.  The first year the Fuyu were the first ones to come on and we didn’t get any seed then in later years we were getting seed so we wonder whether that might be it. We’ve used both paper and cloth bags and as Lindy says the crows ripped through the paper bags and pecked through the cloth bags so we’re now going to complete exclusion. We grow pumpkins, cucumbers and rockmelons in toilet rolls (cut in half) in a plastic tray and when they just start to get soggy, we plant them out which minimises transplant shock. Egg cartons are much shallower.

Phil We’re starting to establish Pinto Peanut around each fruit tree – it’s a bit slow to establish but once it’s established, we won’t need to do any hand weeding. I did an article for your newsletter on Pinto a while back.  We’ve made an Elder Flower champagne and an Elderberry and Banana Wine but I find them a bit rampant so I get stuck into them with a chainsaw (Elderberry can be a weed). We use concrete Besser blocks for our raised vegetable garden and this seems to be the way to go – we tried timber and a few other things. Last year we had trouble with the birds getting the strawberries so we got some of this bird scare tape from Greenharvest and it seemed to work – the red and the silver make them think there’s fire or danger and they go away so we decided to move into 2002 so we got disco balls and painted every other square with red nail varnish.

Sheryl Have you tried mirrors that Kasper uses? Phil No, but I’m sure it would help. We plant everything on contours – we peg out where the trees will go, stick in a peg, put compost down first, newspaper and chip mulch on top, pull the stake out then put the plant in. We’re putting in a particular Lemon Myrtle (Backhousia citriodora) which has more beneficial oils and less of the off-flavours – from Limpinwood Nursery just outside Murwillumbah. We have two types of Davidson Plums – I have some of the North Qld type which grows out in full sun and is a lot more vigorous and fruits at a different time of the year. Some of the Jaboticaba came from Paul Recher’s place.

Another popular misconception is that the ground under lantana is magnificent – I had the soil tested to prove that it isn’t. When we clear a piece of land of lantana, we either sow millet if it’s spring or oats if it’s autumn and we do this immediately and anybody can come back here and check the creek and it will be clear there’s no erosion or soil loss in the wet season and it also increases organic matter. It’s a temporary crop and I don’t think it will re-grow next season. We don’t irrigate (except for the Blueberries). We have 40 hectares but they measure it on the flat and as we have 90 degree slopes we have about 300 hectares. Jude Get a horse. Phil  I don’t like horses because they do a lot of damage to the ground  and you don’t need a donkey when you’ve got six children!!!  Rainfall is 1800mm.

We’re making up total exclusion netting against the fruit fly following Dr. Dick Drew recommendation (he’s an Entomologist with the DPI) We get netting which is 1.8mm x 1.8mm cut the four corners off and put another strip around it and drop it over the entire tree and it’s the only thing that works so my plan is to keep all my trees down to that size and make a few more nets each year. They cost me $25.00 each –  I got the netting from Vinyl Plastics at Beenleigh.  Use 50% shading. It doesn’t matter if you have a gap at the bottom as fruit fly doesn’t go underneath and birds haven’t been a problem. The other thing we do to discourage fruit fly is to use bait traps and I went through all those complicated contraptions of cutting coke bottles in half and siliconing them back together and eventually I decided that the easiest thing to do was to put a hole in the top (Phil uses a small plastic drink container that has a blue lid). My tops are all colour coded according to the bait inside, so its easy to replace them. I found Wild May very good but don’t know if you can get it anymore. I’ve tried Bovril, urine, yeast – refer to my article I wrote in your newsletter a couple of years ago. In the NASAA bulletin there is a bait that has been approved in organic agriculture. (It is called Nu-Lure and will be available through Grow Force, Primac etc in 20 litre containers in November).

Soil pH should never be used as a guide to calcium requirements – base saturation is the appropriate guideline. Magnesium has more impact on soil pH than calcium so reducing calcium and increasing magnesium through excessive nitrogen will raise soil pH. Liming requirements based on pH levels are irrelevant in this context as calcium can still be deficient because magnesium has more impact on pH, if you reduce the calcium you can actually get a reduction in the pH if you use the wrong one.

Article compiled by Sheryl Backhouse