2020

Print this entry

Merv Cooper is a longstanding, highly active member of the Club. He describes himself as a ‘pomologist’ – what is that, you may ask?  Well, one dictionary definition is “the science of fruit growing”. This is highly apt description of Merv, who takes a very scientific approach to his fruit tree growing, particularly in the area of selectively breeding feijoas.

Merv and his wife Sybil live at Loganlea on a block of about 1 acre, where they have been for about 10 years. Roughly half of their block is devoted to fruit tree growing, with the rest being landscaped with attractive ornamentals. The soil is fairly acidic clay, which Merv treats with lime and dolomite. The orchard’s water supply is from rain-water, gravity fed to drippers, and a bore which can run sprinklers. A feature of the garden is the heavy use of mulch in the form of wood chips. Merv makes quite lot of this mulch himself, using his own chipper. The orchard is completely mulched between trees, with no competition from grass or weeds. Part of the reason for this approach is Merv’s philosophy of ‘minimalist watering’. He reasons that fruit trees should be tough and able to cope largely on their own, although he does water his young trees, and occasionally the larger ones, if they show signs of stress.

One of his water-saving devices is to use 25 litre plastic containers, with a short piece of 13mm poly pipe inserted were the tap inlet is, with a dripper on the end of the pipe. He places these next to trees that require water, and fills the container with a hose every day. The dripper lets the water run slowly out, taking from 12 – 24 hours to empty the container, and thus giving the trees a very slow and deep watering. Merv’s scientific approach is illustrated by the experiment he conducted using these containers. He used his watering method on several trees over a long period, and then dug down next to the roots to see how far they had gone down into the soil, compared with other trees planted at the same time. The slow drip method gave better results, even with citrus, which are considered to be shallow rooted, showing deeper penetration of the roots into the soil, and thus a better ability to cope with heat stress or lack of water.

Merv takes a proactive approach to orchard management, using techniques such as heavy pruning every year in late autumn, and the regular use of boron and potash, in addition to fertilisers like Nitrophoska, superphosphate, and chicken manure pellets. Boron is used every year, in the form of borax at the rate of 1gm per litre, sprayed on at early flowering stage. Merv says this helps fruit set, particularly with custard apples. He also swears by the use of potash, giving his trees a dose once a year. This is applied at about the rate of a 1.5 litre container (for a largish tree) of sulphate of potash spread widely, but Merv says the quantities are not too important, as you can’t really give them too much. He keeps a hive of native bees, which help in pollination.

Pest management is also important to Merv, and he uses several techniques in combination. Fruit fly are controlled with a male attractant and protein spray to knock out females. Cloth bands tied around the trunks of trees (especially citrus) are soaked in chlorpyrifos, which prevents ants from climbing up the tree, and thus controls aphid and scale (chlorpyrifos is available as a commercial product such as Pidgeon’s Pest Controller). Merv monitors pests carefully and if he does have any problem, tries to identify the culprit under his high-powered microscope.

The trees in Merv’s collection are too numerous to list – he has just about everything you could think of! Amongst the more usual citrus, stone fruits, tropical apples, pears, mangos and bananas are some special features, such as a number of members of the Annona family (including Poshte, Cherimoya, Soncoya and Atemoya), and three types of Grumichamas – yellow, black and white. Some edible natives are the Midyim Berry and the delicious Aniseed Myrtle (Backhousia Anisata).  There is an unusual ‘orange raspberry’ from Papua New Guinea, and a large Guasaro tree, both of which he says have really tasty fruits. Other items of interest are a sweet Tamarind which keeps longer and tastes better than the regular variety, and the White Sapote ‘Chris’, which is a very good variety.

In a special section of the garden, Merv is testing his theory that you can interplant species requiring different levels of soil pH, by only treating the immediate root area of the tree, to alter pH as required for each species. He defines the area to be treated by placing sleepers in a square around some of the trees. He has planted in close proximity, a number of trees including Longan, Olive, Governor’s Plum, Blueberry and Rollinia, and believes that the roots of each will avoid the areas where soil pH is not suitable for them.

Merv’s really special interest, though, is selectively breeding Feijoas in the pursuit of a really good variety suited to the sub tropics. He has had a long interest in Feijoas, stemming from his background in the biological sciences for 30 years, working in the administrative and business side of plant development and pest management. In New Zealand, he was involved in obtaining plant variety rights for two varieties of Feijoa (Apollo & Gemini) and their subsequent commercialisation. When he moved to Australia, however, he found there was little in the way of industry support for Feijoa growing, and that the varieties available were very inferior. Inferior seedling trees have been marketed in Australia, giving the species a bad name in terms of taste, whereas the superior selections are actually very good.

Merv explained that the Feijoa grows naturally in only a very limited area on the borders of Uruguay and Brazil in South America. It was first described by a German botanist named Sellow  in the 19^th century, hence its latin name Acca Sellowiana. These trees produce a very poor fruit that is not worth eating but an infusion of the leaves was used by the indigenous people of the area to treat dysentery and cholera. One specimen was transported to Europe in the late 1800’s and it is widely believed that all varieties that are currently available originated from this one plant.

The plant prefers acidic soils (pH ~ 6.0), a sub-tropical to temperate climate and is mainly pollinated by birds such as honeyeaters, rather than bees. They are currently grown mainly in Italy, USA and New Zealand where several good varieties have been developed. Australia has never really had a good breeding program for selection and commercial development of the feijoa.

Merv is one of the few people that not only loves growing interesting and rare fruits but has taken this interest one step further. He has been actively trying to develop new and improved Feijoa varieties suited to sub-tropical climates for some years now. His efforts started when he imported seeds derived from about ten named overseas varieties. He collected seed from two different international locations in order to get as great a genetic variation as possible. From these seeds he propagated 600 seedlings. The best 200 of these (selected for superior disease resistance, tolerance to drought and many other criteria) were planted out in his garden and allowed to grow to fruit bearing size.

The best of these (selected on the basis of disease resistance, overall tree shape, flavour and size of fruit) were cross pollinated with each other. This process involves bagging the flowers and only allowing pollen from selected varieties to pollinate the fruit. This provided seeds for a second generation of Feijoas from which he obtained some eighty plants from which he has obtained four distinct selections which possess the desired characteristics. The cross pollination process has been repeated to give a third generation of Feijoas seedlings that are currently still in pots. Overall this breeding program has taken about ten years and Merv believes that with luck and a little more time he could develop a new Australian variety.

Merv emphasised that Feijoa fruits have to be fully mature for good taste. The fruit is mature if you can place your hand underneath it and gently lift the fruit. If it easily detaches from the stem it is ready, and should not be picked before this stage as it does not ripen well off the tree. The fruit can keep up to 2 weeks, perferably in the fridge.

The scientific approach taken by Merv to his fruit tree growing has led him to collect a large quantity of books and notes about feijoas, native bees, and fruit tree growing topics generally. He is happy to share these resources with others if they have an interest, as he believes in sharing information freely. Give the pomologist a call if you want to know more about these topics!

Print this entry

Bob – you’ll see some netting where we’ve planted some new breeding lines of stone fruit so we don’t lose any of the fruit to birds, bats etc. We also have fruit fly exclusion netting about 2mm diameter which is a clear monofilament type to allow adequate light penetration and no fruit fly to go through the net.

Q.  How do you go with humidity under the fruit fly netting?

Bob – It’s increased

Q.  Do you get any fungal problems?

Bob – No, not as yet but we’re just trialing it to see what problems we are going to have.

To show you what happens when you don’t net, 2 weeks ago we had fruit here on these trees then we had a flock of parrot and there’s not a single Persimmon left.  The only way to be environmentally friendly is to put up netting. My way of thinking is that if we want to have a clean/green system of growing fruit and vegetables then everyone should be paying – not just the growers or the industries.

We have high chill pears but they haven’t fruited.  We tried a whole range of low chill pears a few years ago grafted on Pyrus callarina rootstock and they fruited but we removed them from the Research Station due to money to work on pears. These have come in from our plant breeder who transferred to Maroochy from Stanthorpe, Dr. Bruce Topp. He’s now working on Stone Fruit – we have some Apricots but they have not fruited or flowered heavily because we’re too low-chill and they need high-chill environment. We also have a Strawberry breeding block.

Sheryl – what’s the new PVR type we’ve been hearing about?

A. I think it’s the Camerosa type.

Bob – we can’t get KJ Pink Custard Apple because they think we will use it to cross with other varieties.That is up to the people who have taken out a plant patent on that variety.

Part of the exclusion netting work I’ve been doing with other people – Geoff Wade is our Entomologist, Dr. Ennis Lloyd, & Dr. Alan George. We have a net for bird/bat/fruit-piercing moth.  Sometimes growers will put on fairly heavy insecticide spray which will destroy the predators and sometimes there’s a commercial decision made to eliminate one pest which takes out the predators for another pest. They then re-introduce the predator later so there are many systems that have to be managed in running a commercial enterprise.

We have a monofilament net over the lychees.

Collection Block

Carob –– they have male and female trees for the types used to produce beans – the main use for this hermaphidite type is for feeding cattle and that’s the reason why many of the hermaphodite types were bred.  They can feed cattle with this foliage – particularly in very dry, arid conditions as these varieties will grow well.

Sheryl – there are big plantings in S.A.

Bob – we get fruit on this tree but lose a lot due to too high a level of moisture.

Sweet Tamarind – we do have a tamarind here but due to the cool conditions it does not produce good quality pods

Sheryl – you’re better off to buy it in a packet at the Chinese shop already prepared!

Bob – Abiu fruits very well here, Wampi – Tem Pay & Gay Sham, both good varieties, Star Apple doesn’t get much dieback – we have the purple type, a green one as well as a yellow type. Wax Jambu, Water Apple has had quite a few fruit on it, Mammy Americana took about 7 years to fruit

Robert P – I got my Mamy A as a root graft from Cairns.

Bob – the Mammy Sapote in California in 1987 was worth $5 million making them into sherbets and drinks in the restaurant trade.

Robert P – are these prone to phythophera as they can get dieback

Bob – heavy soils seem to affect them – they like a lot of organic matter

Robert P –  I’ve heard that if you have trouble with these you can put it on as a foliar spray

Bob – you can spray or drench the ground with a phosphoric acid but it is not registered to be used with this tree fruit.

Bob Feijoa – if it won’t fruit, graft a few varieties onto the one tree so this allows for cross pollination.

Patrick – another alternative to grafting onto Feijoas is to plant 2 trees into the same hole.

Bob White Sapote need pollinators as well

Robert – my Pike seems to set by itself, Vernon, Bluemthel are pollinators.  Will Pike and Lemon Gold be OK with each other?

George Lemon Gold is a partial pollinator

Bob – Yellow Gold needs a pollinator.  Denzler is an ever-bearing variety – all Casimoria fruit is thin-skinned and won’t last so it’s very difficult to get it to a consumer

George – Miracle fruit likes a bit of shade

Bob – Mulberry – Morus alba – Morus nigra is the European mulberry (black) but it doesn’t grow very well here.

Fruit Fly Exclusion Netting Trial

Netting – we have black netting and white netting – that’s the fruit fly netting.  The normal black netting is used for bird/bat and the white is the special fruit fly netting from NetPro with the logs being donated by Coppers Logs.  NetPro erected the netting for us and the net was manufactured by Gale Pacific in Melbourne.  The black net is cooler by 3 degrees and the white net is hotter by 5 degrees compared to ambient air temperature.

Sheryl – black absorbs heat – how is this?

Bob – black netting intercepts more light whereas the white netting with the translucent fibres lets more light go inside.  The light bounced around inside and with the restricted air flow the heat is trapped inside due to the smaller diameter of the net.

George – so we can use black and get a slightly lower chill factor

Bob – yes, but you’ve got problems with fruit fly exclusion. With the netting last year we didn’t spray the block at all for fruit fly, we had 100% infestation of fruit fly under the black net if we did not spray – it’s approximately 10ml mesh.

With the fruit fly netting on we’ve had 4 male fruit fly trapped – they’re runts and we don’t know whether they incubated in the ground over last season or because they are so small they got through the net – the other thing with the male is that he won’t sting the fruit.  We have attractants to pull the fruit fly inside the net to test its effectiveness.

George – do you have male and female traps inside or are you using the yeast bait to see if there are any female?

Bob – no we just have the pheromones – we don’t use any chemical sprays.

George – With Grumichamas they never use to get stung but now they do and the grubs are a lot smaller than the grubs in normal fruit – I think you’ll find that the fruit fly will eventually mutate to be able to get through there and I think you’ll selectively breed small fruit fly!!!

George – nature has its way of getting around things unfortunately!

Sheryl – getting back to this black & white netting – you can’t compare two different colours if they’re not the same density.

Bob – no that’s a normal (control) – that’s normally the type of netting that growers have been putting up.  What we’re doing is applying a different regime with 2 different management strategies to each block. One looking at the effects of normal commercial practices carried out on this site (block) compared to our modified practices out on the other site (modified is the white netting).

Bob – we have both the yellow and the red Pitaya but the cacto-blastus gives it a real flogging. They do best in a hotter climate. They’re growing approximately 10,000 acres of Dragon Fruit in Vietnam. There’s also the spineless type.

Robert P – the yellow tastes the best.

George – Gordon Vallance used to crop them very successfully down in Mullumbimby – basically the red flesh one.

Article compiled by Sheryl Backhouse

Print this entry

Many members will know Mark Kickbusch, who attends club meetings regularly, generally with several trees in hand to donate to the raffle. I wonder how many would suspect that Mark lives in a quaint cottage on half an acre, in an historic little town, where he tends over a hundred rare fruit trees. That town is Forest Hill, near Gatton, and Mark has lived there for 9 years. It is not really very far from Brisbane – about an hour’s drive – and is a great place to go for a Sunday drive because of its historic buildings (two pubs!) and surrounding landscape.

Mark’s property has the lovely black soil for which the Lockyer Valley is renowned, but it is subject to quite heavy frosts. So Mark has planted numerous stone and pome fruits which can withstand frost, and these are doing well, but he experiences some difficulty with the semi-tropicals. Not for want of trying though – as he has quite a collection of warmer climate trees like mangoes, custard apples, Kwai Muk and Green Sapote. In fact Mark’s whole garden demonstrates his attitude of trying anything out, and thereby pushing the boundaries of where and how we might expect trees to grow.

An interesting feature of Mark’s garden is his collection of really unusual rare fruits. These include, for example, Kitembilla, Paccalacca (which has flowered), Tazziberry and Buddha’s hand citron. They are amongst many other rare and more common fruiting trees.  Some are interesting varieties that Mark has procured from specialist places such as Ric Deering’s. He pointed out, for example, the “Meager” Plum which seems to be quite resistant to fruit fly, and the Golden Fig which he says is the best eating. His Jujube has had a first fruit – this will make many club members envious! A very large Kei Apple tree has not yet fruited, but Mark has planted another nearby in case it is requiring a male and female. A very old original tree in the garden is a 50 year old Persimmon – probably Nightingale.

Also tucked in spots around the garden are some very interesting native fruiting shrubs and trees, including Native Mulberry (which has a tiny white fruit), Native Ginger, Queensland Arrowroot, Bolwarra, Currant Bush (tastes like dried fruit), Wombat Berry, Finger Lime, Burdekin Plum, a special Lillypilly from the Kimberly region, and many more.

No spot is wasted in Mark’s garden. Along the front fence are some interesting vines such as Gold Kiwifruit, Panama Gold passionfruit and Passiflora foetida (from which he makes cordial). Out the back are his productive vegetables beds, with winter crops of cabbages and other greens already well advanced. All the trees are on a watering system drawing from town water – evidence of Mark’s good planning in setting up his orchard.

It is quite clear that Mark is a collector with a passion for the unusual. As well as growing rare fruits, he has several other very interesting hobbies. He restores old motor bikes, collects some very unusual antiques, and indulges in jam-making, and preserving fruits. This makes good use of his excess fruit. Before leaving, we persuaded him to share some of his favourite recipes with the club.

Mark’s Bottled Persimmons:  Most people wouldn’t think of bottling persimmons, but Mark says they preserve really well and make an excellent stewed fruit, served with cream. His method: Take ripe but still quite firm persimmons and pack them whole in preserving jars. Cover them with a light syrup of 3 cups water to 1 cup sugar. Bring to the boil to 170 for 2 1/2 hours

Print this entry

Marg’s orchard is located at Morayfield in the Caboolture district.  She has been growing figs for about 25 years and has recently started growing mulberries commercially.  She has approximately 150 fig trees at the moment and approximately 60 mulberry trees that are presently bearing fruit, plus another 75 planted out.  She runs and operates the orchard solely, but her husband generally helps with the picking of the figs for about three weeks around about March during the very heavy picking period.

She also has about 50 mature lychee trees and 20 mature pecan nut trees.  She used to sell the lychees but found that the cropping of this particular variety, Tyso, was irregular, as was the seed size.  These trees were planted about 25 years ago and this was the variety that was recommended then.  The other major problem with lychees is that unless the orchard is fully netted, the flying foxes and rainbow lorikeets think the fruit belongs to them.  Marg’s orchard is not netted and given the irregular cropping, it was not worth the expense of netting it.  So she concentrated on her figs instead.

The pecan trees are also large trees now and the cockatoos raid these each autumn.  They normally bear good crops though, particularly if the winter has been cold with a few frosts, so she normally manages to harvest enough to spread around and sell some.

She only grows one variety, the Brown Turkey, which came from good root stock and seems to grow well in the conditions in her orchard.  These are mid to late bearing figs which she harvests from February to April.

Marg initially started selling her figs by taking them around on consignment or selling outright to fruit shops on the northside of Brisbane.  She then started to sell them through the Brisbane Markets and she also used to send them via airfreight to an agent at the Sydney Markets.  These days she sells via a few select fruit shops, a few restaurants and direct farm gate sales.

One of the biggest jobs with the fig orchard is the pruning which Marg does in late winter.  As a general rule of thumb, she prunes two thirds of last season’s growth.  As figs generally only grow on the new season’s growth, this is necessary to maintain good crops and keep the trees to a good size for picking.  After pruning, Marg selects the best cuttings for propagation.  This is also a big job, and this year she has tried the cuttings in the bag method to try and establish a good root system.  In previous years Marg has done the cuttings in the traditional method.  Generally with the traditional method, a lot of leaf comes through, but often the roots aren’t developing and the cutting will rot out.

During the farm visit, the figs were just coming out of their dormancy, so they really just looked like dead sticks.  But in a month’s time, they will be loaded with leaf and fruit so Marg said you really should have another visit and see the difference.  It was an opportunity however to see one of the main pests of the fig tree, the fig leaf beetle, in action early in the budding season.

This beetle and its larvae will decimate a tree and ruin the year’s crop if not kept in check.  As Marg tries to use no or limited pesticides, early in the budding season is a crucial time to eliminate as many of these beetles as possible.  The beetles are slow flyers and easy to catch as their general defence is to drop off the tree if touched.  She goes round each tree about 4 or 5 times a week and catches the beetles in a small bucket with oil in the bottom.  This simple method kills the beetle and avoids having to use pesticides.  Any eggs that have been laid or larvae that have hatched, she just squashes.  There was never a known predator bug of the fig leaf beetle or its eggs or larvae, but after years of growing figs and avoiding heavy spraying, Marg’s orchard seems to have generated a beneficial bug which attacks the eggs and larvae.  This bug however, only seems to emerge a couple of weeks after the fig leaf beetle has emerged, so the hand harvesting of the fig leaf beetle early on is crucial.

In the humid sub-tropical climate from Spring to Autumn, the trees are also susceptible to rust, so regular spraying of copper oxychloride or mancozeb helps keep the rust in check.  Failure to do this will see the leaves drop off the trees before the fruit has matured and thus reduce the fruits ability to ripen. Marg pointed out that the soil in the surrounding bushland on the property is quite poor, coastal, sandy, loamy soil.  However years of mowing and mulching have produced quite a contrast to the soil in the orchard which is generally much deeper and richer than the surrounding bushland.  Early in their life, the young fig trees were attacked by nematodes and borers, which Marg attributes largely to the poor soil initially combined with periods of bad weather.  However with the enrichment of the soil over many years, the problem of nematodes and borers has been kept to a minimum. When the fig season starts, picking takes place every day for about three months.  Figs are one of the oldest fruits known to mankind and are regarded as one of the super foods.  They have the highest alkalinity of any fruits and vegetables.  Basically what the experts say about our diet today is that a lot of the food that we eat is high in acid, and you need to get the balance right, just like the garden or the pool.  Neutral is good.  So figs, in that regard, help bring back the balance if you have a lot of acid in your system.  Figs are very high in calcium, potassium and fibre. For fertilizers, in winter when they are dormant, Marg gives them a little feed of lime.  Then in spring and summer she gives them an application of a general all-round fertilizer plus several applications of sulphate of potash. The only fertilizer Marg had put on the mulberries this year was blood and bone.  After the trees have finished fruiting she will prune them, as, like the figs, they will only fruit on the new season wood.  It is also the best way to keep the trees in manageable condition as otherwise they would grow too large.

Marg was asked about the bird problem, but said it wasn’t really much of a problem as there were so many figs, and the lorikeets, the pest of the lychee, only seemed to like the little immature figs late in the season, and because the trees were kept low with the pruning, the flying foxes weren’t much of a problem. She was also asked about fruit fly, but said even though fruit fly was present in the orchard and occasionally stung the fruit, she was told years ago by the DPI that an enzyme under the skin of this particular variety seemed to stop the larvae from developing, and that advice seemed to be right.

Marg’s newest crop of mulberries was right in the middle of harvesting during the farm visit.  Visitors were invited to pick the fruit, which should just drop into your hand when ripe, and taste it.  Marg has sold her mulberry crop this year to an ice cream and sorbet maker.  They are the common black mulberry but are from a good root stock with a great taste. Marg said that they grow like weeds but are a beautiful tree with loads of lovely fruit.  Mulberries have been used in some cultures, eg China for centuries.  In China most of the mulberries are used for food for silkworms for the silk industry, and most of these trees are the white mulberry, as this is the silkworm’s favourite variety.  There are quite a lot of different varieties, red, black, white and pink.  Japan and India are also major mulberry growers.

The mulberry leaf has also been used in these cultures for centuries for medicinal purposes, for tea, as a food and also as feed for stock.  The mulberry leaf makes a wonderful dolmade which Marg said she would show us how to make later in the day, and also taste some she had made the day before. She showed the visitors how to make mulberry leaf tea by microwaving a couple of leaves for a minute or two, then crushing the leaves when they became crunchy and steeping them in boiling water for a couple of minutes.  The resultant tea had a very smooth, silky taste, probably something to do with the fact that they are the basic ingredient in the production of silk!

Marg was asked whether you could change the flavour using different fertilizers.  Don indicated that you need to get the right genetic material, but potash and calcium will help.  They are a pretty tough tree once established. Sheryl said you never really get the ultra sweet black mulberries like the temperate types.  Marg seemed to think the white mulberry was extra sweet just like a lolly, but she thought the tang of the black mulberry was better.  Ken indicated that Sulphate of Potassium increases the sweetness.

After touring the orchard, visitors then did a bush walk through Marg’s property, then came back to the shed where they tasted the dolmades made from mulberry leaves and were then given a demonstration by Marg on how to make them.  Marg then showed the visitors her pruning equipment and one of the native bee hives on the property.

Print this entry

Durian orchard  –  a real treasure trove of biodiversity by SIRA HABIBU         Jitra: Durian pulp in a riot of colours including purple, bright orange and deep red can be found in an orchard not far from the fringes of the Bukit Wang forest reserve in Anjung Lima here. The orchard is a veritable treasure trove of biodiversity as far as durian varieties are concerned. Covering an area just the size of three football fields, it has some 150 trees of 72 varieties of the fruit. Orchard owner Mohd Sofi Ibrahim said he had in his collection 55 state-level champion durian varieties from all over the country as well as 17 wild varieties from the forests of Sabah, Sarawak, Brunei and Indonesia. Of all these, the 51-year-old avid durian seed collector gives his top vote to the Tenom variety. “It is the most delicious of them all. The colour of the pulp is purple with occasional tinges of orange and dark red. “I was lucky to have come across this wild variety when I was in Sabah years ago,” Mohd Sofi said. Other wild durians found in his orchard include Kura-kura, Anggunang, Alau, Marahang, Pulu Bekenu, Pengiran Limbang, Royal Brunei, Dalit, Pahes and Bunga Simpul.  “Kura-kura is unique. The fruit grows at the bottom of the stem but it doesn’t taste good,” he said.  Mohd Sofi said the Royal Brunei was among the more delicious varieties, while the pulp of the Anggunang was bright orange. “And Pahes does not taste like durian at all. It tastes like the salak fruit,” he said, adding that the pulp of this variety was yellow with tinges of black. Among the state-level durian champions found in the orchard are Cinta Guru from Kedah, Mas Muar (Johor), Tiong Emas (Terengganu), Hor Lor (Penang), Tok Lituk (Kelantan), Basrah (Pahang) and Si Rusa (Negri Sembilan).  Mohd Sofi, who is a retired Bahasa Melayu teacher, has a passion for agriculture and carpentry. “My orchard is my retreat. I find solace here, away from the hustle and bustle of the city,” he said. Mohd Sofi, who also owns a tour company in Alor Star, said he had set up a recreation park near the orchard. “It is a favourite place among school children, especially during school holidays,” he said, adding that the park was suitable for picnics as it boasted a man-made mini waterfall. The durians in his orchard, he added, were not for sale. “But I will be selling durian saplings from next year,” he said.  Ref:  www.thestar.com.my

Print this entry

During a recent visit to Singapore in February this year I visited Mr. Lee Chong Khee at the Head Horticulture Centre, National Parks Board Tel:+65 62725323 Fax: +65 62728029 http://www.nparks.gov.sg

The Nursery covers 20 hectares and Mr. Lee’s main duty at the nursery is to propagate and maintain the tropical fruit trees. Potting Mix used is 2 parts soil, 1 part sand and 1 part coco-peat. The following notes represent answers to questions I posed:

Grafting Tips:

Approach grafting can be done all year round

Bud grafting is best from March to July in Singapore (our September – January) as the branches are too woody at other times of the year and the bud comes off easily at this time. We take buds about 1 ½ inches long (30mm) early in the morning then keep them in a wet cloth and then graft on the same day.  Cover with 50mm wide Nescofilm put out by Nippon Shoji Kaisha Ltd., Osaka Japan.

Marcotting      Always make sure that your marcot is in the shade – not in the sun – can be done all year.

Carambola     Can be air-layered and grafted

Custard Apples     Bud or Wedge graft.  We’ve never tried marcotting them but you can try.

Durian             We’ve tried many methods but find that springtime bud grafting is the best method for peeling off the bud but you can also wedge graft and approach graft.

Jackfruit         We only grow from seed but you could bud graft in Spring.

Mango             If you want to top work your mango and graft on new varieties, chop it off and wait for the new shoots to appear so they’re about 30-50 cm long and about the thickness of a pencil. You can either Bud graft, Wedge graft or Approach graft.

Papaya            We Tongue graft it.

General Notes:

 Durian             Never disturb the surface roots as it has a lot of fine hairs. Damaging them affects the quality of the fruit. Best time of year is March to June.

Jackfruit         Ready to pick 90 days from flowering

Kuini               is from the Mango family

Loquat            Won’t fruit in Singapore – very good in Taiwan and Japan

Nutmeg           You need two

Macadamia     Doesn’t fruit or flower here

Mangosteen    Available April May June

Rambutans     Interior branches should be pruned for air ventilation and good sunlight penetration. This is for controlling pests and diseases.

Print this entry

AP – African Pride Custard Apple CA – Custard Apple DPI – Dept of Primary Industries FSB – Fruit Spotting Bug PM – Pink’s Mammoth Custard Apple IPM – Integrated Pest Management KJ Pink – Custard Apple developed by us (named after us Keith & Judy & from a Pinks Mammoth) MB – Mealy Bug PBR – Plant Breeders Rights  

Keith We’ve grown Custard Apples for over 30 years and been on this farm for 26 years. It use to be a pineapple farm but pineapples are not a commercial proposition on these small acreages with the gradient of the hills and erosion. We grew strawberries for a while. We planted African Pride Custard Apples which pollinate very well and get quite a nice fruit if grown really well and the fruit have a nice flavour but they also have a  high percentage of seed.

Sheryl  Are there any varieties of AP that don’t get as many seeds?

Keith    There is a strain of AP called Palethorpe and it’s a big AP.

Sheryl   Is it under Plant Breeders Rights?

Keith     No, contact Alan George at the DPI at Nambour. It’s not as heavy a cropper as straight AP.

Sheryl   How many seeds would there be in it?

Keith    As a percentage, it would be a lot less.  Some of you may remember Island Gem but when you got a shower of rain, you had to duck because all the fruit used to split and throw seeds everywhere. One of the original areas of Brisbane which use to grow CA was the Sunnybank/Rochedale/Redland Bay areas. I remember trees 20 mtrs high. Pinks Mammoth or Bullock Heart has always been the preferred eating fruit. Along came Hilary White which was a sport off Pinks Mammoth. A chap called Hilary White at Redland Bay noticed a branch bearing differently on a tree so the DPI monitored it. It produces more fruit but has a softer skin but it’s still the Pinks Mammoth flavour but does tend to set a few more fruit than what straight Pinks Mammoth does but it splits more and has a few other smaller problems but it is very pleasant to eat and has good colour. Our KJ came from a sport on a PM as well. It was the furthermost tree on our property against the scrub and it was the furthermost branch on that tree and we noticed that it had a lot more fruit set on it. It actually got a big ball of fruit and it was a very small branch so we propped it up so it didn’t snap off. It had a ball of fruit you could put your arms around but you couldn’t put your hand in it as it was just solid fruit. Alan George and I watched it for 5 years and then planted some out so it was 7-8 years before we got PBR on it.

Member  Did you propagate by seed?

Keith    No, most varieties of tree crops are not true to type from seed – some are but usually they’re propagated by grafting or cutting shoots or taking budwood to produce that actual tree otherwise you lose the strain. It’s changed custard apple growing because people can plant KJ’s and they know they’ll get a good commercial crop but the biggest problem is that if you don’t thin the fruit off the tree, you get smaller fruit. The industry has now planted around 15,000 trees and it’s exactly the same flavour as PM. We use to grow about 40-50 tonne every year.

Fruit Spotting Bugs

are a major problem in this area and they say that here is the home of the Spotting Bug. Judy and I use to spend about 3 hours every afternoon from the 1st November to February hand pollinating fruit except when it was raining but in January if we got a storm or had a wind change, it would bring the spotting bugs in out of the scrub so we could lose 70-80% of our pollinated fruit. Spotting Bugs sting a multitude of things.  They live in the scrub but you could have a wave of adults go through your orchard and sting your fruit and you can’t find them because they feed on the fruit and lay their eggs and then they’re gone. Then 2-3 weeks later you get all the little nymphs hatching out.

Bob   Can you describe the Fruit Spotting Bug as people get confused.

Keith A lot of people get confused with the nymphs as Assassin Bugs but the difference is that the Spotting Bug has two little antennae with two little lumps on the antennae and also he’ll run and hide from you whereas the Assassin Bug which is exactly the same colour and shape won’t bother to run away.

Keith  There are two types of Spotting Bugs. One is just called Fruit Spotting Bug and one is called Banana Spotting Bug. The adult FSB is yellow-green and is about 15mm long and the females lay pale green oval eggs about 2mm long.  The banana spotting bug is the same size but tends to be a little bit more yellowish. If you squash it, it smells like nothing else! If you find a Green Shield Bug, it smells quite bad too but the SB is about half an inch long, a round green insect which tends to hide from you and you can  usually see them stinging the fruit. They did tests on FSB stinging the fruit and it’s a ridiculous amount of stings that a bug will do on a fruit in an hour eg. if you get one SP on a custard apple tree with 50 fruit on, then in 2 days virtually every fruit can be damaged.

Col   They’re not laying their eggs?

Keith  They’re feeding but they will lay their eggs on top of a fruit or somewhere else. We didn’t bother to spray the top orchard and they stung 100% of the  fruit on the trees. They also can feed on the tips of foliage as well. We have a big forest of Piccabeans and other rainforest trees and the bugs appear to breed there as it’s a natural home for them.

Sheryl   What do you spray them with?

Keith   There’s a range of insecticides you can use but you have to stay within the guidelines recommended for any insecticide you use. Most insecticides don’t appear to give long residual protection against SB. You could spray with something as heavy as Supracide and a couple of days later you could have reinfestation. It’s just one of those insects that is a real problem in horticulture.

Sheryl  So you really have to net the fruit?

Keith   Some areas don’t suffer as badly as we appear to in this area. We have a tree over the back – the tree that had the KJ sport on it and this year, the tree is covered in fruit and not a single SB on it and yet up here they stung out the whole orchard.  A lot of growers used to go around and physically squash the SB as they might only have one hot spot in the orchard where just a few appear, but here in this area it is worse than anywhere. A lot of growers don’t even spray for SB – they’ll put up with a few stings. They’re also a major problem in passionfruit. In late August/Sept they’ll come out of the forest when we have all new growth on our passionfruit vines, they’ll sting all the tips off the whole orchard if we don’t spray for them.

George   What about something like Confidor which is systemic?

Keith     We have not had any success with Confidor in the trial spraying we did on our property.  Dan Smith, an entomologist with the DPI helped us with Integrated Pest Management in our orchard over many years.  Dan said there was a parasite of FSB and heaven help us if ever that parasite dies but when you have huge populations in the forest, there’s obviously no parasitisation working and with our Passionfruit, we may only spray twice a year with an insecticide. We’re finding a lot of things are deterrents to a degree – we use a lot of IPM in our orchard. We sometimes have Mealy Bug really bad here. Anyone who grows Custard Apples or Passionfruit know MB are quite a problem. We released Anagyrus seven years ago and we did have another insect called Leptomastic which was a tremendous predator of MB in custard apples and other crops but they became unavailable so Dan bought in Anagyrus – another little wasp parasite and we tried that but it didn’t seem to do anything. Last year, we normally buy Cryptolaemus insects (ladybirds) off Bugs for Bugs for controlling MB in the Passionfruit and custard apples but there was a problem getting them for our CA so we had a big infestation of MB but all  of a sudden we noticed something was wiping out all the MB and it was this Anogyrus – he’d been living here and had become so strong that the Anogyrus and another little gnat went through our entire orchard and wiped out all the MB and he’s now moved into our Passionfruit which also suffer from a type of MB – it’s not the citrus MB. The mealy bug predators were surviving even though we were spraying for FSB. We also took them down to a friend’s custard apple orchard at Beerburrum this year and released them.  He also suffers really badly with MB – they leave soot on the fruit and they’re going through his orchard like quicksilver. The gnat lays that many eggs and he breeds a little maggot and it gets around and eats all the MB and the Anagyrus goes round and parasitises it so they multiply and hatch very quickly. They’ve got so much food that when the MB starts to run out, that’s when we’ve always had a problem with other insects because all the MB are killed and there’s nothing for them to feed on but for some reason the Anagyrus is surviving here. We’re not sending any Avocado or Custards to market this year but we do spray them to keep them clean – we use Dipthrex on our Passionfruit for Spotting Bug – it’s not the best thing but it does work. When we spray the Passionfruit, we turn the air blast off and just drive through with the mister up as high as it can get so it just wafts along the top and doesn’t go into the vine and kill the predatory insect because the FSB is all on the outside so it kills the adults out of them. With CA, it’s a developing market and it’s hit a snag with the export and Hong Kong has stopped exporting into China and that is where the good quality of CA were going.

Bob C    Why did China do that?

Keith     It took over Hong Kong and I guess there was a market feeding into China. In Australia we have lots of bio-security problems – you’ve heard of the Banana importation from the Philippines with moco disease and a friend of mine says that it’s not a case of if we get moco disease, it’s a case of when so that would devastate the banana industry in Australia.  With food in general, the government is only trying to give people an avenue of cheap food – not all Australians can afford to buy the very best and as long as the food is nutritious, the govt is providing a service to people. Another threat to small farmers is managed investment funds – big companies going into horticulture and planting huge areas in which they have unlimited funds and they displace all the small farmers.

Sheryl  So tell us how to get Custard Apples on our trees Keith.

Keith    It’s not as hard as you think!

Sheryl  Oh yes it is!

Keith    If you want to hand pollinate, it’s a lot of fun!

Sheryl  Oh no it’s not!!!  I’m a failure but perhaps it’s the Fruit Spotting Bug attacking as we’re next to bush.

Keith    It is onerous to do it all the time but it is a lot of fun because you get to see what you’ve done – you get a much bigger fruit. The problem with CA pollination is that the flower begins as a female and then it has a transition where the stigma is moist as a female but as it changes to a male flower usually about 3.30 in the afternoon, the pollen releases but if the air is not the right consistency of moisture, then the stigma dries and so it’s not receptive to the pollen so the pollen wafts free. Most CA are pollinated by wind movement of the pollen rather than insects – insects tend to damage them.

Sheryl  Even the Nitidulid beetle?

Keith   We did a trial here – we use to breed them in the orchard by getting baskets of pineapple.

Sheryl   I tried that but the crows ate the pineapple.

Keith    The beetle actually damaged the stigma so it resulted in poor quality fruit so they’re no benefit at all.  With KJs’ it shortened the distance between female to male and the stigma is still receptive.

Sheryl   So how can you tell if the moisture in the air is right?

Keith   Unfortunately with this weather, there won’t be any flowers on the trees but when you open a flower and you can see a little secretion on the stigma and if you touch it, it’s quite wet. It’s very easy to see.

Sheryl   So it’s no use pollinating if it’s not?

Keith   We pollinate regardless because you will still get pollinated fruit even though it’s not visually receptive. It’s fun. You pick your male flowers at 3.30pm – you don’t need a lot of flowers – it’s what you do with the pollen as to why you’re not successful. Get a tray with some brown paper in it, shiny side up, lay your flowers in that and if you want to get the pollen more quickly, put the air conditioner on – it’s a temperature inversion that makes them open so wait until they pop open. I get some PVC dust and that’s the real way to do it – just use a little with the pollen as it has static electricity which the pollen sticks to.  The slightest moisture and it sweats. Get a magnifying glass and look at the pollen ball. If there’s the slightest bit of moisture, the pollen will explode so they’re all spent. Don’t collect the flowers in a plastic bag.

George   Humidity has to be a certain level?

Keith      It probably helps to have higher humidity levels.

Sheryl    How much PVC dust to pollen?

Keith     We pick about 200 flowers in a tray – it’s great if you have an AP as well as the PM because you can use the AP flowers. The pollen of KJs is much more fertile.  Put the flowers in a sieve and you’ll see the stamen which is the little part of the flower where the pollen is on the end of it and you’ll need a magnifying glass to see the actual brown little ball but you have the stamen and the pollen together so you get just a little PVC dust – about a teaspoon and sprinkle it all over your pollen and brush all the pollen down into one corner and brush it into your bottle then use a No. 4 sable brush and dab it in your bottle then open the flower with 3 fingers and very gently dab it in – don’t jamb it up there!!! The female is white around the stigma whereas the stamen appears brown in the male.

Member   In the books they say to do it in the morning.

Keith      Quite often the pollen could have gone off – you might have moisture in the house. Every morning there’s usually high humidity, moisture, dew, mist and if you bump a leaf and look into the sun, and that dew goes into your bottle, you’re wasting your time. You could also get it on your brush so that is why we collect the male flowers at 3.30 – you’ve usually got about half an hour before they pop open although it does vary with the temperature. If it’s a really hot day, you’re wasting your time because they won’t pop open. You need a nice normal afternoon.

Sheryl   What temperature would you say don’t bother.

Keith    Over 30º but the temperature may drop very rapidly in the late afternoon which makes it pop really well.  So after you’ve prepared the pollen, you pollinate later on that same day but quite often, the females won’t open until just on dusk. A lot of growers use headlights and pollinate in the dark. Some days are good and some days are a waste of time.

George   Do they have an insect pollinator in South America where they are native to?

Keith    When you hand pollinate, you don’t want the insects/beetles in there. European bees don’t pollinate because they’re too big to get in.

Sheryl   What trees have you seen the native bees on?

Keith    They’ll collect Custard Apple pollen from the male but they won’t go in to a female flower as there’s no pollen there for them to collect.

George   So the tree is not suitable for insect pollination at all.

Keith     Not at all.

Bob C    How long is the pollen viable for?

Keith     We use the pollen that same afternoon. Some people use it the next day. With PM if you have a tree that is 5-6 years old and you’ve been pruning it every year and you’re not getting any fruit, just leave it alone – don’t prune!!  It may get some water shoots and you may have to take some out but just leave the laterals to grow and then it will form into an umbrella canopy with fine little branches and the tree will be just covered in fruit you won’t believe it. You might not get a lot of evenly shaped fruit, but you will get a heap of CA to eat.

Fertiliser

I use either Rustica or Nitrophoska and that’s all you need to use. Don’t give it any Nitrogen at all.

Sheryl   When do you put it on?

Keith    We found it was better to put it on in the middle of winter rather than after pruning because Alan George did a lot of root zone trials as to when root movement starts and we found that root movement starts a lot earlier than what the shooting does so you need the fertiliser on late winter (beginning of August) or even a bit earlier to allow it to dissolve and get in to the root zone so the nutrient can be taken up.

Sheryl   Would you put the fertiliser on 2-3 times a year or a little and often?

Keith    Because they have such a big aerial root system, probably 2-3 times a year. Once you get your crop on, you can be a bit more liberal eg if it’s a big tree, use 2-3 kgs around the drip zone – don’t put fertiliser anywhere near the trunk of any tree as it doesn’t like it. We don’t use copper on our farm.  We haven’t used it for 10-12 years. Somebody told my wife to put copper around our Poinciana and it would it flower and 2-3 weeks it was dead!! A neighbour had algae in his dam so he got 2 pieces of Copper Sulphate the size of my fist and the water was crystal clear in 3 weeks but there wasn’t a living organism in that dam – it killed all the shrimp, fish, everything. Since we’ve stopped using it on the farm, we’ve noticed a huge difference in the worms and soil. Our ground is just alive with earthworms under our passionfruit.

George   Do you use Mancozeb?

Keith     Yes when CA are getting black spots over them – most of it is Cecospra, and Mancozeb will stop that but when you’re growing them for yourselves, I wouldn’t spray them at all.

Sheryl    Do you mulch?

Keith     Yes. We replant half our farm with passionfruit each year – about 2000 vines and sameside them (plant them back into the same spot) and we put a 25kg bag of mushroom compost at each planting site. We use 60 tonnes a year.

Member   There’s a mushroom farm at Woodford – 50 cents a bag.

Keith     After you put it out and it breaks down and you get a second lot of mushrooms coming up, you can then eat this second lot of mushrooms.

Joe   If you’ve got a single tree, how many days would you wait before you re-pollinated. I use a clothes peg to delineate the flowers I have hand pollinated.

Keith   Two.

Member   How long is the flowering season?

Keith    If you wanting more flowers, you can break off some leaves on your laterals where you want some fruit and you’ll get a shoot there with flowers. A friend of ours has only just stopped pollinating.  It depends how many fruit you want – in January, if you’re wanting more flowers, then break off some leaves.

Sheryl   How much water do you use?

Keith     I haven’t watered these at all this year although I sprinkled last week.

Joe        I found the last ones I pollinated, the fruit are not very big but I have over 100 fruit on my tree.

Keith   That’s because you’ve got so many fruit on. My later fruit are by far the biggest because all the other fruit have gone so the later fruit has no competition.

Propagation

Use a cherimoya seed for rootstock, then graft on.

George   AP produces good seedlings.

Keith    It doesn’t have as much resistance to wilt – you want a vigorous rootstock.  If you have a vigorous growing tree, you wouldn’t get any fruit.  We grew Maroochy Gold for about 12 years but it is very attractive to fruit fly and you can’t tell if it has been stung.

Sheryl   What do you use against fruit fly?

Keith   We use a mixture of hymal and yeast autolysate and recommendations for its use are on the label.

Sheryl  Keith is still the owner of the KJ variety and has contracted with Birdwood to propagate his trees.

Keith  For eating quality, just buy a Hilary White CA. If you find something special, patent it as it’s quite quick and it’s not that expensive. Approach someone like ANFIC.   You can patent the tree or you can patent the fruit you produce.

Col   We’d all like to grow a KJ.

Keith   Anyone who buys my trees signs a non-propagation agreement and it’s only sold to commercial growers because if every backyarder can grow one, then the market will diminish. The farmer has to have some advantage to want to continue to grow. The market has been really hurt by the export being cut back but because the KJ produces a huge volume of mediocre sized fruit, it’s a lot better for supermarkets because most people don’t want to buy a big fruit. Because KJ is self pollinating, you do tend to get a bigger percentage of seed but in the trial work, the ratio of pulp to seed was the same in KJs as in PM.

Sheryl    You mentioned that by planting an AP you can use the flowers to pollinate the PM.

Keith     The pollen in AP is probably more fertile than it is in the Pinks.

Sheryl    I’ve read that you should keep your branches off the ground to stop ants from going up.

Keith    True but I’ve never bothered. We don’t need to with Anagyrus and the gnat clearing up the mealy bug.

Sheryl   Do you use Lebaycid at all?

Keith    No, we spray our Lychees with Dimethoate for fruit fly.

Pruning Lychees

We take a couple of substantial branches out of the tree every year to try and keep the height down and keep the tree more open. For picking lychees we have a machine where 4 people stand on a platform It’s hydraulic so it can go into the tree or up and down and we have lights so we start picking at 3am and finish at 8am at the latest because they start to dehydrate  ie the quality of the fruit lessens and it affects shelf life.

Pruning Custard Apples 

If you prune, no more than a 1/3 of your lateral in late winter (August). If you go back past halfway, it will vegetate but with 1/3 off, it will get a whole new range of canes. With young trees, try and open them out so the tree is not too dense in the heart of it. I make my trees into a step letter so I always had an opening and I can walk in and I can step in and walk around up the branches and carry a bucket.

If you cut too much wood off a tree it will vegetate.

How to tell when to pick your fruit   

It will have a greasy feel to it and the carpals have opened up and have a creamy tinge. They take about 3 days to ripen.  The longer you leave the fruit to get bigger, the more volume of flesh to ratio of seed.

Passionfruit

There’s a whole row which is dead  –  got hit by lightning. There’s a 96A variety which is sold to the public. They’re grown on one wire between wooden poles about 2 mtrs high,4 mtrs apart and 3mtrs between rows. Fusarium attacks the roots and Phytophera then gets in and kills the vine so that is why we plant grafted vines which have a fusarium resistant rootstock.

Sheryl    Why don’t you grow Panama varieties?

Keith     It doesn’t have the shelf life.

Sheryl   How do you control Anthracnose?

Keith    We can’t stop it – it’s just one of those things that we have no fungicide to control it.

Sheryl   What do you do about Phytophora?

Keith   I use Naturamin as a soil conditioner once a year on all crops and it seems to be helping against Phytophera.

Print this entry

None of our trees have been irrigated over the last few years because we have a holiday camp here for flying foxes.

The Abiu struggles here and is a problem – it’s a undergrowth tree and really needs shade – this one is grafted and you can’t really fertilise – 10 years ago when I got that the fruit it would have been 10 times that size but as soon as you put fertiliser on the tree the fruit will drop no matter what size. The DPI said you should just try out a few seedlings to see if you can get one. Potash won’t work.

The White Star Apple dies back every winter – I got 2 fruit off it – it just doesn’t like the cold here – there’s a huge big weeping one behind. Haitiian has a thicker skin and has a tendency to just spread but has larger fruit if you water and fertilise but the white one is a total failure. (A couple of members get a few fruit off their white seedling type)

Cherry of the Rio Grande grows 4 times faster than the Pitomba and they are sweet, pear shaped with a large seed inside but quite often the Pitomba has no seed inside and you get little fruit so don’t be disappointed if it has a lot of little fruit to start off – I have found that when the trees get older that they do self pollinate but it’s still better if you have two trees.

Pine Nut (Pinus Pinea) I did have it but I found that in the summer they would scorch so the sunny side would burn and the shady side would grow so eventually it gets to be a very odd shape.

The Macadamia is a rainforest tree so they don’t like it when it’s too dry.

The Sapodilla takes the cold – mine has taken – 4 deg. I have a seedling one that’s smooth not grainy like other fruit but extremely difficult to graft or airlayer. There’s one called Tropical – a grainy type. There’s another called Roger which is suppose to be very good.

The Soursop is not very happy with the drought but they always die back in the winter as it’s a really tropical tree.

Two different types of airlayered Longans – Howe is more spreading and Kohalla is more upright. We recommend these two varieties and if you have patience try a BQ which has the biggest fruit but sometimes it’s biennial because the crop is too late. If you have a tree that’s not flowering, sometimes you can get one that’s a male but it will still flower. This will happen in a Black Sapote – I heard that the odd one is a male – we planted 30 down by the dam and 1 was a male. We marcot over April/May for the spring – if you do it Feb/Mar, the roots will be established by mid winter and when you take it off you’ll kill it.  It loves shade – the healthiest tree is always the one in the shade.

If you want a “small” tree then plant a Pecan!!! The cockatoos come every day and have a lovely time – they’re very silent and all you see is nuts coming down and when they go they make a lot of noise – they’re saying thank you!

Black Sapote likes heavy soil – they crack too quickly in light soil if you don’t irrigate – I have Mossman which has very large fruit & Bernnaker which has big flat fruit which are very nice but a relatively shy bearer. I bought this Green Sapote originally from Don Gray up north for $50.00 – If we get a lot of rain, they drop their fruit. I grafted another one onto Mammey and they grew a lot better and we get much heavier crops. Mammey will take rain but the Green prefers dry weather – it’s a mountain tree. The other Green Sapote here is the only one which is grafted onto green sapote rootstock and it airlayers very well but grafted onto Mammey I found it doesn’t airlayer very well at all. We use peat moss and soil in our airlayer mix. Sometimes we use just soil and add a bit of dolomite. I don’t use Super but I’ve been told that if you mix in ground up Superphosphate you’ll get better success but we don’t want to get too rich because we’d have to pay too much tax so we don’t worry if only half take! We get an 80% success rate. It has a roundish fruit where others are pointed.

The White Sapote absolutely hates wet soil and in some areas, some will not bear by themselves. An American study found that the same variety will bear quite happily but 100m away it will cross pollinate, so if you find that it hasn’t flowered for five years and has no fruit or the fruit falls off, then it needs cross-pollination but you could also try a bit of Borax. Sometimes the pollen is not viable. Put the boron on a few weeks before it flowers – when you see the buds and use only 1 or 2 gms with a litre of water. If you put too much on it will defoliate the tree. A lot of trees that won’t pollinate often do after you spray with Boron. We have a Pike variety – some areas self-pollinating and other areas not. Reinnakie Commercial is a self-pollinating and we also have Golden Globe: the smallest tree but very good fruit. The ever-bearing ones like Su-belle I found usually struggle because most of the time they drop their fruits. Lemon Gold is a pollinator but as it has 95% male flowers it doesn’t pollinate itself very well! It does have a beautiful flower though – similar to Golden Globe which has a stunning taste. Dennsler Rockhampton is a self-pollinating variety which grows into a huge tree and has large fruit which have a strong taste but if you pick them early you get a nice mild taste. There’s also a Southern Densler which hasn’t got much taste.

This is a seedling Sweetsop or Squamosa. The DPI use to tell you that you could use it’s own rootstock but it’s totally unsuitable as they will only grow for a year or two. Rollinias grow and bear very quickly within 18 months. Don’t go for the grafted – I got a seedling from northern NSW they call Picone and they’re doing very well.

If you want to see a decent fig tree, then go out to the cement works at Darra and the tree is bigger than my Eucalypt and it had about a 1000 trays of fruit on it and he cut it back severely and I told him he could have paid for his house with what it had cut off – stunning big fruit – so obviously it likes lime.

Other trees that like lime are the Ju-Jube and Sapodilla. Lime goes into the soil very slowly so apply it every two years – it only goes down an inch into the soil. Gypsum neutralises the soil so if you put it on top it will go down a foot – the first sign is that water won’t go in .

The Ice Cream Bean – there are two types – the large cold-tolerant red tipped one has sweeter fruit – the one I have you need two trees to cross pollinate but the seed pods were two feet long.

Mango – look after them as lousy as you can – the best varieties that do well here are the R2E2, Kwan (a type of Nam Doc) Florigon and the Bowen. Bambaroo from the Rockhampton area is also very good, and Middleton and Hatten from northern NSW are also very good. You’ll get a smaller but better flavoured fruit if you don’t irrigate. If you find your Mangoes or Lychees are flushing too much and getting too much vegetative growth instead of fruiting then put on a handful Muriate of Potash on around April and not more than a kilo for a really large tree. Nam Doc My is a wet weather tree and does well in the tropics – north of Townsville it bears all year round and if you have dry weather it has a tendency not to set and is susceptible to mildew – a few other varieties get mildew too but you get this condition much more in dry weather than in wet weather – a lot of people don’t believe you – they think you get mildew in wet weather but what happens is that the spores float around and you get the heavy dew in the morning and all the spores set but when you get heavy rain the spores wash away and you get a lot less problem and when you see the white fluff on the stems and that also makes a hard skin on the fruit. We found that the new one, Kwan, has a lot less of a problem. We think it’s a seedling with a Nam Doc background. It’s about twice as fat, same seed, and it has more orange flesh not yellow like the Nam Doc and seems to be bearing every year – it’s a very good fruit. I’m not keen on Nam Doc – it’s definitely sweet but has no flavour but if you like sweet you’ll be pleased with it and it also has a small seed. We get good crops of Nam Doc but if we spray we use Sulphur – we would never use copper on a Nam Doc. Sulphur is good for mildew. Copper gives the fruit a hard skin which then has a tendency to crack the skin. (One of our club members had a problem with cracking and put trace elements on which solved his problem) Prune when you first see them flowering. Some of the cold tolerant Bowens seem to be slowly adjusting to this area but Nam Doc will set at 9 deg.

I have a seedling Mammey Sapote – fruit can get to 2kg.

One of my rarer trees is a Velvet Apple or Mabola – very touchy – we don’t sell them as most people manage to kill them.

Custard Apple – Pinks Mammoth has large sweet fruit with much fewer seeds but you’ll get more fruit but smaller on Hilary White and African Pride.

We had a Rambuttan that flowered in its second year and three weeks later it’s dead!

With Jackfruit, the male flower falls off once it’s finished and some trees will have up to 18 months before they have a female flower – you can easily pick them because the male flower has a thin stem. The female flower has a finger thick stem right. Black Gold is excellent and is the only one which is sweet in winter if it ripens then. Asians prefer the crisp one which is more tropical but we found that we get very poor crops – one of them is called Dulatten and Bosworth and Galaxy which has very big fruit. We have a pink coloured variety called Pinks which can get up to 20kgs but it won’t ripen in winter whereas Black Gold will ripen and be sweet. I got them from Fitzroy in Rockhampton –many different varieties. If you want a fast growing tree, here’s a Candle Nut you can put on a little house block but you can shift the house afterward!!!

The Carambolas – recommended varieties around SQ Qld are Fang Tung, any of the B series and 1-11 (Kare) This last one ripens in winter and is very sweet. Wheeler also ripens in winter so is not subject to fruit fly damage but I think it tastes like medicine but the Americans love it because you can drop them on the ground and pick it up and still sell it a week later! It’s nice and firm – like the Strawberries and the Tomatoes!

This is what we make the money out of – all the Asians buy this tree – it’s a Magnolia – nothing to do with fruit. A White Michellia alba related to the Port Wine Magnolia has lovely perfumed flowers for six months of the year and they tell me that it’s a very difficult tree to grow but they say that if you’re honest it will grow! So a Chinese man gave it to me and he said “Grow it” because nobody will come back and tell you that it died!! However someone did come back and tell me that their tree died and when I told him the saying he said that the chap shouldn’t have told me that because “We’re all a superstitious lot!!” There’s a yellow flowering one called Champaka – the Himalayan Magnolia and we also have a white flowering one as well – the yellow one has plenty of seeds so we grow it from seed and graft or occasionally we air-layer it – small flowers. The Indians like the yellow one.

The tree which is probably the biggest disappointment but probably the best tree I have in the whole place is the Malay Apple – it has stunning fruit the size of an apple if it pollinates and a bright red flower but it always flowers in the winter and very few set so I’ve been told that if you don’t have a proper wet season it won’t flower until it gets cooler because the wet makes the ground cooler and it will then automatically flower so I have flooded them but it still wouldn’t work but the fruit is like a perfume Jonathon Apple with a crisp beautiful taste. The flower is like a gum flower – very stunning and red.

Wax Jambu – White Laulau – it also has a seed and is crossed between the red and white and is very sweet – strictly speaking the Wax Jambu has no seeds but this one has.

We have two bisexual pawpaw – the round red one and the long red one. The flavour of the round is sweeter but has a soft flesh whereas the long one has a firmer flesh. You’ll see we have a couple of mirrors hanging down on a piece of string – one at each end of the vegetable garden to ward off birds, wallabies etc. The secret is in the way you hang them up – tie them around the centre so when they hang, they keep turning around continuously so the light reflects off and gives a flash.

The Cedar Bay Cherry has fruit on 8 months of the year. Very hardy, will grow in shade or full sun.

Bruce has made wine out of this Yellow Mangosteen – grow them in the shade from seed.

The Cambodians and Vietnamese use the Canistels green.

Stone fruit is only good for about 12-15 years. Blood Oranges won’t colour up here but if you put them in the refrigerator for 10 days they will.

compiled by Sheryl Backhouse

Print this entry

The name of the property is Pamplemoose Park and it’s situated at Wollongbar. Sheryl  Where does the property name originate? John It’s German for Grapefruit in French but it’s just a coincidence that my father heard the name but historically it was the name of the first Tropical Botanical Gardens in the world at Madagascar around 1600. The French tried to break the Dutch hold over the spice trade. Sheryl  Your father is well read.

John  We started off here growing Stonefruit but then we branched into Persimmons in 1998 and our main cultivar is Fuyu which is the Japanese non-astringent variety and this plot has just under 1000 trees and 1 in 10 is a pollinator named Gaily which is very vigorous and has an upright growth and is an Astringent variety. Every third tree at every third row so basically every tree is surrounded by 9 other tree so every tree has proximity to a pollinator.  They need pollination to set an even crop – the Fuyu in particular needs to be pollinated. Certainly in a bad year the trees that aren’t pollinated will drop worse and cause you more trouble. You’ll get a more even yield and they’re not a seedy fruit anyway. You’ll only wind up with 2-3 seeds in them anyway and we also have 5 rows of Jiro which is a lead in dwarfing variety and comes in 2 weeks earlier but it’s not the main export variety.

Sheryl Why do you think Fuyu are more popular than other varieties?

John It’s the main variety in Asia and it’s what they expect. In Japan there are over 80 different varieties. The Fuyu have slightly better lasting qualities and thicker skin. The Italian community like the astringent Nightingale variety but the export agents ask for Fuyu.

Pests  Fruit Spotting Bug – I monitor for it but it’s not much of a problem and I do spray. I put out baits for Fruit Fly and bait stations for rats. We use Racumin powder because it’s a multifeed type so it won’t knock around your predatory birds and it’s the only one that’s registered in the Macadamia Industry.

Sheryl  That wouldn’t be a problem here because your Persimmons are netted.

John It’s more a problem that if a bird sees a half dead rat around then it can knock off your owls eagles etc. We use a mix of 20kg sunflower seed with 1kg Racumin powder. 

Sheryl How do you put it out? John We have old offcuts of 50 – 100mm PVC about 300-400mm long and put a scoop in each of the bait stations.

Sheryl If you have them on the ground, doesn’t the rain interfere?

John No, it doesn’t seem to get into it too badly. In the Macadamias, we have more of a problem. We’re using unpunched draincorp and pulling it into a look about a metre long then we just give it a shake to see if they’ve knocked off the bait. You’ll see usually if they’ve been at them because there’ll be husks.

Fruit Fly We use the Bugs for Bugs trap. The wick is recommended to last for around 3 months. For this one hectare, we use one in each corner and one in the centre so you can tell if there is a particular area that the flies come to. We’ve had very low counts here even though we’re right on the bush. 5 flies per trap per day is when you start looking at Lebaycid spraying. When the fruit gets to the susceptible stage, I’ll start with the Yeast Autolysact and Maldison mixture.

Netting   We just have bird netting Sheryl What about hail? John We’ll cross our fingers on that one! We do have the Stonefruit netted. It was expensive to do the structure properly and this area is not like Stanthorpe and to do it properly I’ve seen a lot of places where the net hasn’t been set up properly and they got a lot of damage to the structure and still got damage to the fruit – the main risks we saw ourselves facing were birds and bats particularly lorikeets, parrots and crows. The Noisy Minors, seem to know how to get in and they tend to go back to the same bit of fruit, and the Crows and most of the other birds will do the same but the Lorikeets, they seem to go for the fruit when it’s not overripe but with the Stonefruit, they’ll just have a pick on everything because its bright coloured but not oversweet. The Bats will scramble around in a Stonefruit tree and wreck half a dozen bits of fruit trying to find a piece of really sweet fruit because it hasn’t built up really high sugar levels but I don’t mind the Noisy Minors getting in now because they’re very territorial and they’ll chase off the Lorikeets. Sheryl What about wallabies running into your net from the outside? John No, we haven’t many around here. Down at Halfway Creek they’ve had big problems and Ross Stumke at Gatton has had problems. Fruit Fly Lure – Autolysate by Bugs for Bugs at Munduberah Ph: 4165 4663.  You can  also add either wettable powder Lorsban, Hy-Mal (Maldison) to it. 10 litres water to 200ml of fruit fly lure. I use 10% of that mixture in a backpack.  The Maldison will actually burn the fruit. The idea is that when the female fly comes in they need a protein feed before they lay their eggs and they’ll go for the yeast  auto lysate  for the protein and be poisoned  I use one backpack for pesticides and one for the bait spray and I’ll do a very course spray on the leaves so from Dec/Jan onwards. On a hectare I’ll only use 20 litres compared to when you’re tree spraying when you’ll use 1000 litres so you’re using a tiny amount of chemical. One year when I did the spraying off the tractor with a handgun, I actually got more damage from the Maldison burn than from the fruit fly stinging.  I tend to use only 2-3 bait sprays per season. I get my produce packed by the House of No Steps for the Melbourne market as it needs to be dipped in Rogor Dimethoate 10ml:10litres so it’s stronger than if you’re spraying it in the paddock 75ml in 100 litres. You have to get the dip tested with the Rogor and the extra cost of the protocol is somewhere between $200-$400 if you have to get more than one test done. We tend to send most of our Stonefruit to Melbourne.

Trellising   Persimmons are a very heavy cropper but they’ve also got a lot of willowy growth. You want fast early production so you can maximum your tree growth because you don’t have to prune them very hard.  Growing them free standing without the trellising, the trees tend to overload and the branches will hang down on the ground and limbs break and as well as that your fruit gets rubbed so it downgrades a very large percentage of fruit. Pruning tends to be not so hard in the early years and you spend more time training them with a central leader and a palmette coming off every 400mm. We let them grow to 4 metres and harvest them with a platform. We started off this trellising with 2.4 coppers logs and used passionfruit poles in-between and 50mm end poles with 4 runners and I run the irrigation off the ground on the bottom runner so it’s off the ground. One of the problems we’ve got is that the poles have pulled in a little. We’ve got too much tension on the end poles and with the red clay soils around here, when they get saturated, the poles tend to loosen up – we get a wetting and drying effect, the houses get a lot of trouble not so much with the cracking of the clay which they get down on the flats but when the soil gets saturated, what we found was it tended to pull the poles over so don’t make your struts too short. Sheryl  Did you copy this system? John We used a similar system to grapes. NZ has a few different types of trellising but the vertical palmette suits us because we grew Stonefruit like that for a number of years. Fuyu are planted 3 metres apart and Jiro are 2½ metres apart because they’re more of a dwarfing tree and there are 4 metres between rows.

Sheryl  Would you choose a different type of trellising next time? John Yes, the logs we used were 2.4 and after sinking them in 700mm, there’s about 1.7mtr out of the ground but we could do with another wire so we changed the system for the new block so 3 metre poles would be better. The 2.4 would be OK for grapes but when you have the extra weight, it pulls it over. I can highly recommend using these gripples which allows you to retension the wires. The other thing we use is scrap electrical wire in 100ml lengths for trellising ties. With some of the younger trees we also buy notched rubber trellising ties and these allow the tree to expand. If you use other types, you always have to reattach them when the tree grows. When we did the new block, we bought 3 mtr poles and angled hem 10º outward and used screw-in anchors that have a head of 200mm diameter and drove them in with an auger to sit the poles in and the end assemblies came from Waratah and they use them in grapes and we used a larger gripple that uses the same tool to do them up. This new steel post system that we put in was very quick – the interposts cost $10.00 and wire assembly was $13.00 I use an electric compressor from the shed because the pneumatic secateurs haven’t got a very high air demand. It’s not like having rotary powered tools that take a lot of air like the chainsaw This is $80.00 for 300 metres so we run that out and just have droppers coming down with a fitting and just run your lines out from that so you’re not having to work with a petrol motor clunking next to you and it’s much cheaper to run an electric compressor.

Fertiliser  They’re fairly heavy feeders. When they come out of dormancy in September I give them a bit of Rustica N12 P5.2 K14  It’s similar to Nitrophoska. Campbells bring it in – it’s a Dutch manufactured one and it’s also got trace elements. The next application is in December.   I tend to put a bit of extra boron in my herbicide sprays so that gets done four times a year. They like a lot of calcium as well around the 6 – 8 level. pH should be 6 to 6 ½  (if it’s higher add some lime) – Stonefruit should be 5 to 5 ½

Sheryl How much Boron would you give per tree? John About a teaspoon of Boric Acid or Solubor 3-4 times a year and put it on anytime. Because it’s a very mobile element, it keeps leaching out. Probably not during winter with dormant deciduous trees. It doesn’t mix well with foliar sprays. If you did and mixed it with Zinc, you’ll get gelling in your spray tank.  I think that Rustica is a bit low in Zinc so you might have to top that up. Rule of thumb is every 2 years if it’s a problem year then you should get your soil tested every 2 years.

Irrigation  The sprinklers I have put on deliver 35 litres per hour  and in a relative dry week, after checking the tensiometers to see what is happening, I’ll put on 2 x 2 hour applications in a week so this works out to be approx. 140 litres to each tree per week. Spring is very dry around here so I start this program from when they break dormancy in September – they don’t use a lot of water at first, the main irrigation is up to December and from December you can cut back irrigation. With the tensiometer, you water it down to 10 centrebars of soil suction and let it come up to 35. 10 is fill capacity 35 is becoming dryer. The tensiometer can dry out and if this happens refill the water column.  I’ll come back in a day or two and it should be up over 40 but it’s not an issue during dormancy.  

Fruit   It depends on the market – they’re mainly export based – they’re one of the largest fruits in Asia. They’ll keep in a fruit bowl for three weeks. Sheryl I find Nashi and Kiwi are the same. If I’m down south during the Nashi season, I’ll buy a large quantity off the farm and they’ll keep in the fridge for months.

Sheryl  How long will they hang on the tree? John  Months. I’ve seen them in cold places where the trees have lost all their leaves but the fruit will be hanging on. Another name for them is the Asian Apple. In the First World War, they were the largest number of fruit tree species planted because they were so big in China and Asia in general.

Sheryl  How are you educating Australians to at them? John  I’m on the Committee and we’ve only just got levy funding to do R & D and marketing.

Sheryl  Do the fruit ever split? John  No but they get a calyx separation on the really big ones and that can be a bit of a nuisance because where they develop the injury, they’ll develop the ethylene around an injury and that will make them ripen fast.

Sheryl What causes that? John Just growing too fast. Sheryl Not enough water? John No I think it’s just to do with cell division particularly with Fuyu because it tends to happen only with the really big fruit when they’ll get calyx separation.

Sheryl Who do you buy your trees from?  John  Rossmount (Gympie) We got some others from Halfway Creek which is between Coffs Harbour and Grafton. We mounded the trees on a slight hill of approx 300mm with 4 metres between rows and 3 metres between each tree and the trellises and trees are planted on the centre of the rows.

Netting  We’ve used NetPro and Summit Netting. Dad designed the early nets. He was involved with the Wildlife Carers finding out what did keep the bats out.