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Bio-dynamics is about bringing vitality back to the soil – the humus, the microbes and the life.

Sheryl   I recently attended a meeting of the Suncoast Organic Growers Group (no longer active) to hear Terry give a talk on how he farms bio-dynamically.  Les Nicholls is the President of this group and meetings are held at his place on the 1^st Thursday evening of every month at 5.30pm. There are also field trips every second month usually on a Sunday starting at noon in Feb.  Address:  Sandy Creek Organic Farm, 2471 Old Gympie Road, Beerwah Ph: 5496 9501. Les buys his seed from Fairbanks Seed Co. 542 Footscray Rd West Melbourne & Greenpatch Seed Co. The Club visited Terry in May 1994 when he lived at Mt. Mee and took us on a tour of his Custard Apple farm.

Terry  I went to Gatton Agricultural College in the late 60’s on a DPI scholarship to study poultry but because I was the only one doing this, I was put in with the Agriculture, Horticulture, the Food Manufacture. I reckon I should have come out of there with four certificates as I attended all these lectures as well as the poultry ones but what I did learn from Gatton Ag College was that it wasn’t affected by the American multinational chemical companies so they were actually teaching you knowledge that wasn’t biased and they actually warned us back then about the antibiotic resistance that was developing in America through these intensive farming practices feeding antibiotics to livestock and the lecturers were warning us then that this would follow through to humans so I got a good grounding in the do’s and dont’s of animal husbandry but I have always questioned the so-called intensive philosophy of drugs and when I left there, the DPI offered me a job as an Extension Officer at Murgon to go into pigs. I had spent two years doing poultry but I didn’t take up their job offer for various reasons and ended up working for a large chicken company but soon discovered that these new multinationals didn’t want anyone with any brains because it was the start of the quality product as they called it and they just wanted people to follow the manual and it was virtually the demise of the thinking farmer and the thinking Extensive Officer eg. today you did this and tomorrow you did that so I felt I was wasting my time and all your college graduates are virtually taught by the same principle. I just didn’t believe in using chemicals for no reason at all. eg with an American company in an American university, your way of thinking would be influenced by what chemical company was supporting that agricultural college because whatever research they were doing, the outcome is more or less pre-determined – it’s a bit like holding an enquiry into politics – you know the outcome at the start! They were feeding them antibiotics all the time and while they were doing this, the American companies were behind all this push on Australia’s poultry industry and wanted to treat the farm as a business and how they use to operate was they would have a batch of chickens, clean out the shed completely, lime it, take all the equipment outside and solarize it probably put kerosene around the building then start another batch of chickens.

Sheryl How long would the solarising process take?

Terry About a week – it was about 2½ week turnaround to clean up and they worked out that it was costing them approximately 2 batches of chickens per year so they decided to just put sawdust straight on top of the old sawdust. Well, everything went alright for the first batch then they started getting disease outbreaks so they started feeding them antibiotics and that worked OK for a little while then they noticed that their feed to weight ratio on their conversion charts – the chooks were eating all this food but not putting on weight and they realised that the antibiotics were upsetting the microflora in the guts of the chickens so to counteract the effects of the antibiotics, they started giving them growth hormones and this is how the cycle started by intensive industry so basically it’s a hygiene problem that they’ve got. I have an intensive chicken farm across the road from me and I believe they’ve now gone the full circle and back to doing one batch. They’ve gone away from antibiotics as there was resistance. It got that bad in America that the residue levels of hormones of people who ate chicken 4-5 times a week, the men were developing breasts.

That was my interest in organics and what led me into bio-dynamics was I bought a farm at Mt. Mee with custard apples and I did alright for the first 12 months then one night we had 20” of rain and of the 200 trees I put in, there were 198 dead and after questioning why, it was a combination of poor rootstock selection from the nursery but the best the DPI could say was they were dying of phytophera and to use Ridomil. I questioned the chemical fix then looked at organics then got into bio-dynamics because back then there were only 3 organisations NASA (National Association of Sustainable Agriculture), BFA (Bio-dynamic Federation of Australia) and BDAA (Bio-dynamic Agricultural Association of Australia) that Alec Podilinski runs. I went to them all and asked what the conditions were. What struck me about BDAA was that they didn’t have any licensing fees for your product and they set no mandatory guidelines on when you obtained A grade accreditation for the farm – you’d only get that rating when Alex Podilinski decided that your soil was up to that sustainable level so that’s what convinced me to join BDAA. If you approach him, he will appoint a mentor in your area and then he’ll insist that you go away and read his books and there are four videos as well and these are on farming practices, cultivation, one on stirring machines and another on other farms. His books are quite involved and I found that I could only read a couple of pages then had to put it down as they were taken off lectures so his whole books are transcripts of lectures he has given so it takes a bit of following so I read all his books and a bit about the man and was quite impressed. I was warned he didn’t tolerate fools easily; he went through all the rigmarole and if you were prepared to make the commitment to bio-dynamics, he would help you. I went to visit my mentor who was growing bananas but he was growing them totally different to what I was planning to do on my orchard  Paul Sykes and my mentor guided me through the best part of my introduction to bio-dynamics. When I first went back to them, they asked how I was going with the books. “Pretty good” I said “I’m just about up to the part of the virgin sacrifice!” Paul didn’t have a sense of humour and that’s how heavy it gets! They were starting to lose me on the zodiac influence but I certainly related to the effects of the moon, but Alex came round and had a look at the farm and told me how to go about it and most problems I had were caused by compaction of the soil. It was an old dairy farm and over the years the cattle had compacted the ground so there’s no soil structure and that’s the most important thing in bio-dynamics because without that you’ve got nothing and that leads to all your problems. I’ve been to some organic farms and they have no soil structure at all – they may be farming organically but there’s definitely no soil structure. The first thing he said that I had to do was to deep-rip the ground every 6 metres which was a bit of a hassle as I already had trees in so you get a bit p!!!ed off when you think that the tree root you are pulling out is a bit of irrigation pipe you’ve buried and forgotten about! Then I ripped every 9 metres across to break the soil. He’s very particular on your sillaging practice that you do it at the right time when the ground is dry so that you actually break the ground apart.

Sheryl How far down do you go?

Terry As deep as you can go. I was probably going down 2½ feet – as much as the tractor would pull. If it’s dry, you’ll actually fracture and put cracks in the soil and you have to be very good on the angle of the ripper that you use. Nearly every farm you walk on in Australia would have a hardpan because of inappropriate tillaging practices.

Member Did you do this at your new property at Beerburrum?

Terry No, I have different soil there – I’m on sand. At Mt. Mee I had red volcanic soil and started in 1982 and by the time I left in 2001, it was black soil. If you went to the boundary line you were back into the red soil. It stopped where I had been spraying the 500 preparation. Alex will tell you just so much. He likes you to be a thinking farmer; he believes that you don’t get it out of the book; he wants you to use your eyes/brains and work it out for yourself. He’ll rarely tell you the answer that you want to hear. He’ll make you go away and think. He just wants you to observe and work with nature. I started to do all that ripping at Mt. Mee and in those days I wasn’t registered – you could put out lime and dolomite and you were allowed to mix it with superphosphate so that the lime counteracted the acidifying effect of the superphosphate. We then planted it under pasture because with bio-dynamics the 500 that you spray out, it needs the plant roots to work so when you spray the 500 to get it in the ground, the microbes actually travel down into the ground via the plant roots and it’s your plant roots that give you the soil structure; gives you the organic matter – the lot. With horticulture, I consider it’s not a mono-culture because if you have trees above the ground, you’re actually growing a pasture and you’re growing humus and organic matter under the ground by the plant roots and what happens is you’ll let the grass grow up 6-9 inches til it’s a lush green then you’ll mow it off and the better mower you have, the better! On my new place, I bought a Kubota front cut mover which throws all the beautiful clippings under the trees and gives a good mulch but what happens is that as your plant grows up, it also grows down as well so that when you mow it off, the roots shorten up and die off so that they become your organic matter for the next lot of roots that come down to feed on.

Sheryl What do you grow?

Terry Legumes are the best. Red & White Clover are the best two.

Sheryl Summer or Winter crop?

Terry Whatever – your White Clover will come up in spring and Pinto Peanut is good if you’re in the high country. Woolly Pod Vetch is very good at establishing quickly – it will grow up but it dies down naturally but you want to mow it before it seeds!

Member It will climb – went right up my bananas!

Terry Storage is very important for the 500 preparation. It has to be kept in glazed ceramic jars surrounded by 3” of peat moss and they’re very particular on their method of stirring. The only argument I’ve won with Alex is with heating up the water. If you go anywhere inland, they’ve all got facilities for heating water but I maintain that when I was putting out the 500, I’d normally put it out when there was a couple of days of showery weather, I’d mow the grass then mix it out in the open and I asked Alex why I had to heat the water because most times when I’m putting it out it’s around 30º and stirring it out in the open for an hour or so, it would go back to an ambient air temperature so he didn’t make me get a heating device for the water.

Member Can you use dam water?

Member Pure water is better.

Sheryl I’ve read that you have to stir it by hand one way for an hour then the other way for the following hour!

Member The farmers have now developed a stirring machine – it’s an electric motor on pulleys and as it spins around it makes a vortex and it has a float system that comes up and as it reaches a certain water height, it trips the machine and a switch reverses the motor and it goes back the other way. We paid about $900 for the machine. It does about 60 litres at a time. It beats stirring it by hand for an hour! It takes about 14-18 seconds to make the vortex and what they call chaos is the period between creating a vortex in the opposite direction. What you are doing is activating the 500 by oxygenating it and increasing the bacterial count of the 500 by 76,000 times in an hour so the microbes can multiply so that when you spray it out say of an evening when you have moisture, so that from one bacteria, in 24 hours your bacteria can go up 2 million to 1 so that’s how it works.

Sheryl How often do you put it out?

Member Twice a year – during the first lot of rain in November then again coming into Autumn. The only thing Alex insists on is that you don’t do it in a node day which is when the moon comes between the earth and the sun but it only happens twice a month when you get an ascending and a descending node.  In summer Alex sends up a mixture called Prepared 500 but it’s also got all the other preparations in except 501.  The 501 preparation is cow manure from lactating cows which they put in a cow horn and they bury it around Easter then dig it up around November.

Sheryl So none of you do this – you just buy the preparation off Alex in Victoria?

Terry Why would you bother when you can just get it off him. I get enough for 40 acres at a time and it costs me about $25-$30.00 but what you have to remember with the 500 is that you are putting out a living organism and it needs the air and it needs moisture. You put it out within an hour of it being stirred.

Member  I was reading something about the water molecule H²0 being a bipolar molecule; positive at the hydrogen ends and negative at the oxygen end. Solution 500 is the equivalent of an ionic crystal and when placed in water becomes fully hydrated and so its active ionic components can migrate in the water to where they will be taken up by the plant cells and used in plant growth. (*see note at end).

Terry I just think of it as a living organism which you were putting in the water! Alex is very particular in that if you are going to heat the water that it’s heated by wood/gas/solar – doesn’t like electricity/plastic hoses.

Member  There’s the chemical, the biological and the energy.

Sheryl  How many members here are bio-dynamic?

Answer A few although some don’t classify themselves as bio-dynamic but just use the preparation.

Terry What the 500 does is that it travels down the plant’s roots so you get air space which allows the plant to breathe but with compacted soil, there’s no air space so it can’t breathe so a bio-dynamic farmer will do better in a drought. You can change your soil in quite a short period of time. They reckon it takes thousands of years but with the microbes if you dig down deep enough, you can see where the microbes have travelled down the plant root into the sub-soil and the soil will actually change around the plant roots. On my present property at Beerburrum, I got it up to A grade accreditation in 18 months but I think it would have been quicker than that because Alex only visits every 12 months. If you have sandy soil, I reckon within 12 months with sandy soil because I’ve got the overhead water, the grass and this was a neglected farm.

SherylIf you don’t have water and have to rely on rain, is it going to work?

Terry It will work but it will just take longer because the microbes need moisture to survive so the more moisture the better.

Sheryl Do you share the Stirring Machine amongst yourselves?

Terry No, it’s very finely tuned. I grow Chokos, Custard Apples, Vegetables without any other inputs. 

Sheryl So you don’t use any extra fertiliser?

Terry No. I think that soil & leaf analysis is very subjective. You could have it done by one company and another one done by a different company and they will give you different results.

Member The results will depend on what they want to sell!!!

Terry Most of the soil testing are done by the chemical companies so if you went to your handbook on say custard apples, you’ll see that it will match the recommended dose! What convinced me with this preparation 500 is that I started off with compacted soil at Mt. Mee and on the red soil and you get into that sub-soil which is almost yellow, when you actually see the plant roots get into that and you can see the browning and the microbes working and changing it from clay to soil, then you’re convinced. 

Sheryl If you currently have mulch down, would you put your preparation down on top of your mulch or take it away?

Terry I put mine on the grass. Most of the plant roots which feed your tree are out on the edge.

Member Can you put it down on bare ground?

Les What we’re developing now is a system of stripping so we have one metre of grass, one metre of vegies and so on and the grass will keep the root system in place to keep the soil structure – hopefully. We put out our 500 with a knapsack spray.

Terry I have a tractor and a little boom – it’s run off battery operated wiper blades off a 1964 Holden and it’s an old oscillating type.

Les What sort of pump does Alex recommend?

Terry  8 psi is the max. allowed. It’s a diaphragm pump and it has a flicking action because of the windscreen wiper attachments.

Sheryl  Les, when you want to change over your strip rows, how do you achieve this?

Les With great difficulty – it’s one of the challenges.

Sheryl So how do you?

Les We use a rotary hoe on it but we don’t grow Vegetables on the area that was used for grass.

Terry  A lot of people want to put on heaps of fertiliser because they’ve taken so much out but a lot of that is rubbish because most of the weight you are taking out in fruit is probably 90% water. You’re taking very little nutrient out of the soil and by using the 500 and constantly mowing, you’re putting more back in than is needed.

Les  A measurement is that a plant actually exudes up to 70% of the nutrition that it creates through photo synthesis to feed the microbes around the root so that they are giving out as well as taking in.

Member Do you ever use cowpat pit?

Terry No, what’s that?

Member It’s better than cow horns. You get cow manure, egg shells and basalt and mix it for an hour by hand then put it in a pit in the ground and add your preps in there and leave it for two months and when you bring it out, it’s all gluggy.

Sheryl What combination do you use?

Member A barrow load of cow manure to 800 gms of egg shell and 2 kilos of basalt powder. 

Member When you farm bio-dynamically, you don’t need all these other inputs that people are trying to sell. If you need any inputs, the minimum would be crusher dust and if you want to put any manures out, then do a sheet compost on the ground. Sheet compost is when you throw the manure straight on the ground and letting it break down. 

Terry There’s a whole bureaucracy built around organic fertiliser and lots of hangers on wanting to sell their product that you don’t really need and a lot of them are in a form that the plant can’t pick up anyway. It’s the microbes that create most of your plant food. If you read some of your books, it’s the microbes that change some of the elements and create.

Sheryl What books do you suggest that our members read?

Terry Any of Alex Podolinsky’s books. “Bio-dynamic Agriculture Introductory Lectures Vol. I & Vol. II. His videos are also very good. Alex says that if you can grow good weeds and good grass, why do you need a soil test? It’s only if nothing will grow there or the grass is sick, then it’s probably just a lack of nitrogen. I’ve found it very hard establishing legumes. You have to find out which legume suits your area. Avoid climbing types. I think the choko in itself is a legume because when you dig them out, you get a big tuber. Don’t use a slasher; use a proper mower.

Member It’s a myth that legumes fix nitrogen – it’s the microbes. Many other plants can also encourage those microbes – not just legumes eg corn is a very good soil builder.

Terry I’ve done a lot of work for the Sunfresh Growers Group on the Sunshine Coast where I’ve been visiting conventional farmers and they wonder why they have problems with their fruit trees. They’re trying to grow fruit trees on ground that’s as hard as Les’s driveway and they’re expecting to get fruit! They’re attuned to the chemical fix but chemicals don’t fix your soil structure.

*Note from Bob

The water molecule is an open V shape with the oxygen atom at the base of the V and one hydrogen atom at the end of each V arm. The atoms are held by covalent bonds formed by sharing two electrons. The oxygen atom takes a slightly greater share of the electrons so the water molecule is described as bipolar with the oxygen atom slightly negative and each hydrogen atom slightly positive. When ionic crystals are placed in water, the negative oxygen ends of the water molecules are attracted to the positive ions of the ionic crystal while the negative ions attract the hydrogen ends of the water molecules. This process leads to the ions of the ionic crystal becoming completely surrounded by water molecules and then each ion is described as being hydrated and can migrate in the water solution independent of the original molecular bonding in the crystal.

Article compiled by Sheryl Backhouse

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Satya: Why don’t we start off by telling the members what your initial approach was to me, Sheryl?
 

Sheryl: I wanted to educate our members that instead of going to the nursery and buying your fruit trees, that they should get their soil in perfect condition first and only then go out and buy trees. But most of us, including my good self, go on excursions and buy our trees instead of getting the soil in peak condition to get optimum growth from it; so I went looking for a Soil Scientist.
 

Satya: And came out with a Pragmatic Permaculturalist!  I’ll start the talk by dividing it into getting a good root system, preparing your soil and getting it right because if you have these 2 things right, you have the basic mechanics of having a good fruit tree. Of course there are other things such as watering, mulching etc. I’m an Arborist and Horticulturalist, I’m in private practice – I do a lot of post mortems on trees – regularly – and the first question usually is “Why hasn’t my tree grown” and “Why has my tree died” “Why hasn’t it borne fruit, flowers – why is it the wrong colour  – isn’t it healthy, can you work a miracle and do it now” So I’ve bought this one along. It came from one of my client’s properties, from commercial nursery stock – in fact it came out of a plastic bag I believe. 3 trees died out of 50 in a hedge – planted as a seed in a tube – who gets paid the least in a nursery – the guy on the potting bench – he’s paid to put 400-500 trees in every day – the aim is speed –it’s got nothing to do with quality.  There’s a big responsibility on nurserymen that isn’t being taken care of.  So if you have a plant like this, how do you prepare it before you plant it?  
Club: 1. Tease it 2. Cut off the bottom half with a saw if the roots are really bad (root bound) 3. Cut the roots all the way around with your secateurs.
 

Satya: If you buy a tree that dies and you can see that the roots are all root bound, then take it back and ask for another one.  Always check a plant’s root system before it leaves the nursery.  Think of the love and energy you put into your tree – you don’t want to waste your time.  If a tree is not doing well and you dig it up to check its root system and see that the roots are twisted around, cut off the offending roots, replant and spray with an anti-transpirant and it might make it. 
 

Sheryl: Perhaps you could show them the correct way of planting a seed. 
 

Satya: Always start your seed in a minimum 6” pot.  If you want a good tree, don’t pot it on.  Once its root have taken, plant it straight out and this is when I think nurserymen make mistakes – they keep potting it on because it’s not sold – perhaps they only had enough space for 4” pots.  So take your seed and plant it in whatever size pot you are planning to keep it in until you plant it in the field.  Don’t plant a small pot up if you can avoid it.  
 

George:  You can also follow the roots down the tree and cut off any roots.
 

Satya:  Yes you can do that – get out your sharp shovel, and just make a few cuts in the ground.  Watch for girdling of roots – so check them before planting out.
 

Sheryl:  Getting back to the soil!  How can we tell if the problem is just root structure, a slow growing tree or not given  enough water/fertilizer – we’re talking optimum growth. 
 

Satya:  Consult your Arborist! Seriously, one of the benefits of field trips of being a member of a group like this is that you get to look at each other’s trees so you know how fast a certain tree should grow.  
 

George:   My trees are fast growing, close-packed, humid conditions, like a rainforest
 

Satya: …like a microclimate – I know a man who grew Microcitrus australasica – they have a reputation as very slow growers – his made 2 metres in 2 years because he had a good microclimate with plenty of mulch and a good microclimate.  If you have an advanced tree which shows signs that the roots are girdling at the top, you can try just cutting them off  without pulling the whole tree out. Now to soils: In new estates, where they run over the soil with heavy machinery, the soil gets compacted. You can hire an Agroplow or you can get a Wallis Soil Reconditioner which does the same function – they go through the soil – they aerate it down low but don’t break the surface and they do not invert and theoretically you do a close run every 12 inches if you’re doing it once only or every year otherwise.  Then each year either go across or move over 6 inches or so. Talk to your local machinery shop or the local produce place and ask who has one. Having large animals on the property will also compact the soil – if you can’t get one of these, then use a chisel plough.   Soil should be quite dry when you carry this out – crumbly and dry. Another option for a small allotment  is a fork.  On a large allotment, always work along the contour whether you’re ripping or mowing. Put at least 1 metre of mulch around each tree.  Label your trees with name & date – only use aluminium ones.
 

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Robert: This will probably apply to people who have a little bit more land – the best thing you can ever do is get your soil tested – I’ve still got my original report – it’s about 12-13 years old and it tells you what you’ve got plenty of and what you haven’t got enough of because there are two ways of doing things – you can grow things organically or you can grow things with chemical fertiliser – I try to strike a happy balance between the two and you can do things with chemical fertilisers that you can get results with chemical fertilisers that you can’t get with organic fertilisers. If you want a quick response to something, you’re not going to get it with an organic fertiliser but on the whole I do use organic fertilizers. Occasionally if something needs a kick start or you want to put a certain element on that the tree needs, you are going to need chemicals. My particular soil type is a red-brown clay loam: what they call volcanic soil – it’s not like the type you get at Lismore where you just keep going downwards: with mine it varies between a foot and 3 feet and you then you get a nice friable soil underneath: a little bit of soil and a little bit of clay: it’s well drained, it holds good amounts of moisture: haven’t tried avocadoes in it because as far as I am concerned, they take up too much space and I haven’t got enough. 

George: How big is your block?

Robert: It’s just under 2 acres but it’s not all useable: there’s steep patches, there’s a dam and basically down the bottom it’s too cold for some of the things I want to play with. If you don’t have enough water you can’t really play with much at all! In most of the red soils around SEQ, even in northern NSW there are a few things you are going to be short of and there’s a few things that are really important. A lot of people think NPK is the main thing but I tell you that if you have one of your major trace elements missing, you can put all the NPK on you want and your tree is not going to do anything. Basically, most red soils are deficient in zinc, first things that will show symptoms will be custard apples – you get tiny little leaves on the ends. Boron normally doesn’t become apparent until the tree is fruiting and you will get bumpy fruit. With custard apples you’ll get gritty bits in there  – normally that’s a boron deficiency.  

Sheryl: Robert, do you do your own soil testing?

Robert: No, I had it done but I won’t give the name of the people who did it because they mucked it up. They said I had plenty of zinc and being new to the area, I didn’t know that red soil was always 99% deficient in zinc The reason I didn’t twig to it until about 18 months after I put my trees in is that with all the trees I put in, I used about 10 grams of zinc sulphate/hydrate – mix it in a bucket and use that to water the plant in and it just helps the plant to take off. With that, the trees really took off but after about a year they just stopped and it doesn’t matter what I did, I couldn’t get them started again and luckily for me my cousin came around – he works for the CSIRO – and he said you’ve got little leaf which is a zinc deficiency and I said look at my soil test and he said I don’t care what your soil test says, just mix up a bit of zinc and spray it on one of your trees and see what happens so I did that and in six weeks it flushed twice so that might be an extreme case, but trace elements are important.  If you use organics wholly and solely, you’ll get some in your organics but if you’ve got a chronic shortage, it pays to address it.

George: A lot of Australia is like that – you’ve got a lot of old soils – basically they are leached out.

Robert: In most rainforest habitats it’s all cycled again anyway – once you’ve stripped it down, you’ve lost it. Anyway, I supplement my zinc, boron and sulphur: most of the red soils need that sulphur. Also, the fertiliser companies are out to sell products. When I got my report back, I thought – I’m sitting on toxic soil. I had toxic levels of manganese: well, that’s only true if the soil pH goes below 5 – I’ve got plenty of manganese and magnesium but the thing is they didn’t say and it was only after the pH goes below 5 and my soil pH is 6.2 and it’s got a high buffer pH of 5.5  – what a buffer pH means is that it’s hard to raise it or lower it – it’s pretty stable.  I called Nambour and spoke to someone – I went up there for a field day and showed the chap the report and he said you’re nearly running out of time for this season – just stick your trees in and don’t worry – there’s nothing wrong with your soil and he explained everything to me and I was a happy chappie then.  So, what do you do if you’re deficient in any of your trace elements?  Boron – if you want to grow pawpaws, you need Boron if you want to grow a good pawpaw but lots of things need Boron – 5 gms per m². watered in well but don’t put anymore than 5gms on because the tree will go yellow.  I nearly lost a rare Mangos teen doing that. (For Citrus & Custard Apples use 1.5 g per m².) Where pawpaws come from, the average boron level is 3 times that of what you’d find in good boron holding soils in Australia so it’s very high.   I just use Borax. You can get Solu-bor – it’s about twice the strength. You have to halve your dose but it’s 4 times the price so it’s better to go to the local supermarket and get Borax. Zinc: Zinc Sulphate hyptohydrate  – the good thing about that is that Zinc of Boron is something you can put on your Custard Apples every year. 

Sheryl:  What time of the year do you put it on?

Robert: About September (spring) before the major growth flush. Peter might like to jump in if I’m saying anything that’s not right. 

Peter:   Spray it on the new growth

Robert:   I don’t mind putting it on around the tree  – it takes a bit of hassle because when you’re putting zinc in the ground you calculate roughly the square metreage of the root zone which is just slightly bigger than your canopy area and you give them 25-30gms if you’ve got a severe zinc deficiency but zinc is held up by organics so what you have to do – the way they recommend it – is that from your dripline to a foot in from the dripline, scrape away all your mulch and organic and put it just around that strip and water it in well.

George   I think zinc is also locked up by alkaline soils as well

Robert: I don’t think we have a lot of alkaline soils. I think Florida has alkaline soils but I haven’t really researched this.  

Member:  Can you discuss rock minerals?

Robert:  I’ve had some for a while I’m going to try.

George:  The problem with rock minerals is that they are very slow release unless they’re ground up super fine.

Robert:  The same if you want a quick pH change. You have to get the ultra fine – you can get lime in different grades. I had a pretty good calcium level in my soil test so I thought I wouldn’t put any more calcium on my trees – optimum was 10 and I had just under 8 but you always learn and one of the best field trips I went on was to Birdwood Nursery and calcium really makes a difference. You really can’t have too much of it. So in raising your calcium level a simple rule is that if your pH is low and you want to go up, then lime does both. If you want your pH up and you want calcium plus you want a bit of magnesium, then you use dolomite. If you don’t want to change your pH but you just want calcium, then use Gypsum so that’s basically how it goes. That’s about the 3 major sources of calcium you can get easily – so Gypsum gives you Calcium, Dolomite gives you Calcium to boost your pH and it gives you Magnesium, Lime ups your pH and gives you Calcium. Calcium: use 200g per m² every 2 years. That’s what Birdwood uses and it works well for me.

Sheryl:   What time of year?

Robert:  I normally give it with my Spring fertilising although I don’t fertilise everything in Spring – some of the more tropical things, you don’t want to push them because it’s too early.   I give 200g m² (average man’s hand holds 70g) and it’s the type of thing you can’t overdose – same thing with zinc – you can’t overdose but you can overdose with Boron and Copper.   With Copper if you have a bit of a deficiency it does show up in some soils – they just get Copper oxychloride – just make it up to maximum strength as a fungicide and spray the tree.  A good thing is that you can put a little bit of Urea with Boron. The thing about Urea is that if you get a thunderstorm you have nitrogen coming out of the sky – it’s 46% Nitrogen – the trees can’t pick the difference so with your adding if you want to add trace elements, a little bit of Urea helps the tree take it in – normally 3g/litre. Boron is acid and if you put builder’s lime in with it to the same amount so you don’t burn your tree – you have to up the pH. Use 1g of Boron plus 3g of Urea plus 1 litre of water.  I don’t just use that, when I address the Boron problem I do it in the ground on my soil type, I only have to do it once every 4 years.  With custard apples because they like it, they get it every Springtime before the main flush.  One thing you can use Boron for is 1g Boron 3g of Zinc and a litre of water is to spray it on your Mangoes and your Lychees – just as the flower pinnacles come up but before they open – give them a spray then halfway through flowering, give them another spray.  When your fruit tree sets fruit, first comes pollination, then comes fertilisation, doesn’t happen in an instant. The pollen goes on but it has to grow down the tube to get to the ovaries to fertilise it to get the fruit to set. Now what they’ve found is that sometimes with the vagaries of climate, like not enough water, too much, a bit cold, not enough sunshine etc.

Some lychees are a little bit slow and the pollen starts growing down, there’s a bit of thick tissue and it can’t get through and sometimes it might take 5 days to get down there to initiate fertilization. They say that using the Boron – 1 gm\ Boron + 3g Urea – the only reason to use Urea is to get a good uptake of Boron – I’ve had pollen grow down in 18 hours. The DPI have found that after Boron treatment, pollen growth has been as quick as 18 hours. So I tried it – I heard it from Birdwood, tried it that year – most of my Lychees set doubles so it works, but if you’re a little short on Boron, it’s not going to hurt anyway.  

George: You can use it on just about everything.

Robert: If you’ve got something that’s a little bit stubborn or seedlings – a lot of seedlings when they flower they might not flower for a year before they actually set anything.  Another thing it’s good for is that with some of the Persimmons that can set parthenocarpically (without fertilisation) the boron helps them to retain their fruit.  

Slides: Mangoes – From a field day at the DPI Nambour I bought their book and they only recommended 2 varieties – Irwin and Florigon book 21^st Oct 88 has the DPI list of varieties that grow in our area.  Now the thing with Mangoes, if it rains in Springtime when they’re flowering, then the shows over.  I’ve known years when we didn’t get much rain in Spring but it was cooler then average – daytime temperatures were average and the night-time temperatures were low.  What affects mangoes roughly south of Bundaberg from setting that well is pollen tube damage caused by late night temperatures when they’re flowering – not just the rain – there’s 2 things – it is the rain at the wrong time but I feel that Mangoes down here can take a little bit more rain when they’re flowering than Mangoes further up north simply because it’s hotter up there and a little bit more humid around flowering time and there is more chance of getting Anthracnose and Black Spot and Powdery Mildew that some varieties get – a classic is Nam Doc Mai – it doesn’t get the other two but it gets Powdery Mildew.   Nam Doc Mai almost made the ratings – they trialed them over 4 years, the first 3 years they performed very well but the fourth year they totally missed – there was one flower spike on the tree when the field day was on so that got struck off. Another thing I would fail it on is they split but I grow one because I think they are a beautiful Mango. The Irwin that was recommended has a Fruit Fly problem – I have two in – It’s a nice fruit but you can’t pick it too green – there’s not enough sugar level to play with – tastes a bit pineapply – some people like that but I like my Mangoes sweet.  I don’t like a lot of the Asian types I don’t like the flavour.  I’ll top work one and keep the other for old time’s sake.   Florigon is a nice fruit

Sheryl: How do you tell when a Mango is ready to pick – I’ve heard that the end loses its point and rounds off.

Robert: I’ve never noticed – Nam Doc Mai is very pointy and they never lose it.  People say, how do you tell when a Jackfruit is ripe – well, it depends on the variety – there’s too much variation – when you think of the amount of varieties of Mangoes and it’s only one species and it’s split up into races – your Indian race are more rounder and your Chinese race – basically your long skinny ones but it’s not a hard and fast rule. The good thing about grafted trees is they don’t get too big.   Glenn is another good mango but it can’t take cool night-time temperatures – my block faces 3-NE so we don’t get frosts except down the dam. Put your mangoes up high. The warmer it is, the better they’ll set.   Glenn and Nam Doc Mai are my favourite Mangoes. A friend imported  a seed  from Sulawasi which he grew on and fruited in Sydney and he then gave me some budwood – one was grafted onto Bowen rootstock and the other was grafted onto New Guinea Long rootstock – we don’t know whether it’s a variety of Mango. It’s has a very long leaf with wavy edges is a very upright grower. I tried them on different rootstock and they took on both but fruited earlier on the Bowen rootstock.  It looks like a cashew when its very small  then  straightens up.  I also have a Kasturi.  Kuinis has less spotting in winter than the common mango (they tolerate wetter conditions). Lychees  – needs a lot of water. My excess water bill for the last 6 months was just under $500.00. and that’s just to keep them alive. DPI recommended Whai Chi, Salathiel and Bosworth No. 3. Whai Chi and Salathial are low vigour varieties, which means that even if you get a good wet in late autumn or early winter they won’t go into a vegetative flush. B3 are upright growers – Salathiel are a very good variety – very tiny seed.  Grumichamas  – mine has one seed.

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I want to talk to you tonight about a way of controlling insect pests without using insecticide. The technique is called ‘mating disruption’. I’m also going to talk to you about sex because that is what we are manipulating with the technique. It makes use of pheromones, which are defined as chemicals emitted by an individual to send messages to others of the same species. The work is made up from two Greek words – Phero meaning “to carry” and Hormone meaning “to excite or stimulate”. There are a number of different kinds of pheromones but tonight I’ll be talking about sex pheromones, which are a bit like perfumes and are used for attracting mates. Each species has its own unique pheromone and, in the case of moths, are almost always produced by the female.

I work exclusively with moths, although many other insect orders also have pheromones. In moths pheromone is produced and released from a gland that sits at the tip of the abdomen of the female. When the warehouse moth (Ephestia cautella) releases pheromone, or ‘calls’, she curls her abdomen up so that the gland sits above the wing tips. Some species curl the abdomen down and other species don’t do anything obvious at all.  The pheromone is carried off downwind and is detected by the male, who then flies upwind towards her. Pheromones are pretty powerful things  – males only needs a few molecules to excite them, so a little bit goes a long way.

How can we use sex pheromones? One application is as baits in traps, where a small quantity, similar to the amount that a single female would carry, is evaporated from a substrate such as a piece of rubber tubing. In other words the bait is a synthetic version of the female.  Males pick up the scent and come to the trap thinking that they’ll find a female. But all they do is come to a sticky end! Pheromone traps can be used for monitoring and surveillance. For example the Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service (AQIS) uses them around ports to detect the Asian gypsy moth, which is harmful species that can come in by accident. The traps can be used by growers to determine what pest populations are doing. If they monitor their traps on a regular basis they can see whether or not the population is increasing and so decide when to put on control measures or they could use them to indicate whether they have the pest at all.

Mass trapping is a technique that was once thought to have potential as a means of pest control. It was assumed that by trapping and removing enough males, populations would decline and control would follow. However it very rarely works for moths because most males can mate more than once. Even if you trap 80 or 90% of available males, and that is almost impossible to achieve, those that are left behind can still mate with enough females to cause significant damage.

‘Attract and kill’ is a bit like mass trapping except that you use a pheromone in conjunction with an insecticide. The two are put out together as a paste so that when the male is attracted by the pheromone he gets a fatal dose of insecticide. This method is relatively new and is still being evaluated.

Pathogen distribution via moths attracted by pheromone to inoculation chambers is another relatively new technique that has some potential for insect pest control. After the male enters the chamber he gets infected with a pathogen, such as a fungus, which he then takes back out and spreads to others within the population. The pathogen is fatal and causes the insects to die within a few days of becoming infected.

I’ve already mentioned mating disruption briefly and now I’d like to tell you about how we developed the technique for control of a clearwing borer moth in persimmons. It involves releasing large quantities of synthetic pheromone in the orchard. This confuses the males, who simply don’t know which way to go to find the females. If he can’t find a female no mating takes place and we get control.

George Is there only the one signal they use to find a female?

Richard In most cases with moths it is. Some insects use sound and/or sight too: butterflies for example use sight as well as pheromones. But for the moth species we work with it’s almost exclusively odour, at least until the males get very close to the female, when visual cues are sometimes used.

To be honest, we’re not 100% sure how mating disruption technique works – there are a number of possibilities but a likely scenario is that releasing all that pheromone creates a lot of false trails that the males follow without finding a female. It is also possible that with so much synthetic pheromone about the male’s sensory systems become overloaded and are no longer able to detect the small quantities of pheromone released by the female. It’s a bit like us when we come across a bad smell. If we are exposed to it for long enough, our sensory system becomes adapted and we get to the stage where we no longer notice it.

The insect that is creating a real problem in the Persimmon industry is a clearwing moth. Until a year or so ago it was known as Carmenta chrysophanes but then the taxonomists got hold of and changed its name to Ichneumonoptera chrysophanes. It’s much easier to say Carmenta, but tonight I’ll just call it a clear wing moth! Unlike most moths, this one responds to its pheromone during the day, which is a bit of a luxury for us because we like to see how our moths are behaving and with most species that means going out with night vision goggles or infrared light just to see what’s going on.

George Is it a native?

Richard Yes but there are related species in many other parts of the world.

George I don’t think I’ve ever seen one.

Richard No, but you might have seen the damage that they do. In terms of their appearance there’s quite a bit of difference between the male and female, but for most of the moths I work with there isn’t any obvious difference between male and female.

Sheryl What size are they?

Richard About 1cm long. These moths don’t touch the fruit – they ringbark. They’re called borers because the larvae get into the timber itself and cause damage around new shoots as well as old ones. I’ve seen whole limbs that have dropped off trees and in one case in Redland Bay an entire tree had fallen over. I’ve been told by a couple of growers that this insect is limiting expansion of the industry because they haven’t got an effective control measure, other than netting the orchard. The industry had heard of our success with some other fruit tree pests and approached us to see if there was anything we could do for them. There are no chemicals registered for use with this pest and as you can imagine, once the eggs have been laid and the larvae burrow into the tree, they’re almost out of reach of insecticides. New damage is often seen at the base of young shoots (Fig. 1), where small piles of fresh frass are left as larvae burrow in and feed on the layers beneath the bark. Older, larger wounds (Fig. 2), sometimes at the juncture of branches with the main trunk, may also be evident.       

Fig. 1. New damage at base of shoot                                     Fig 2. Old damage

The moth has a number of alternative hosts, including several Eucalyptus, Wisteria and Ficus species as well as Alphitonia excelsa. It has also been recovered from galls on Exocarpos cupressiformis. Its distribution is mostly confined to the east coast of Australia, although one specimen has been recorded from the ACT. When this project started I was approached by some growers in South Australia who also have a borer problem. They have provided some of the funding for this project, but unfortunately it appears that the pest they have down there is not the same one that we have in NSW and Qld. I’ve not been able to get specimens of adults from SA so I still don’t know just what is causing their problem.

Conventionally pheromones are identified by extracting the contents of the pheromone gland and feeding them through a gas chromatograph (GC). Then the components are tested in field trials to confirm that they are attractive to the insect. Now as you’ll probably be aware, the persimmon industry doesn’t have a lot of money for research and so when they came to us to see if we could help we indicated that because of the limited budget we would take a few shortcuts in trying to identify the pheromone. Then we would see how we could use it for control purposes. Our initial research was done down at Redland Bay and subsequent trials were done on Ben Jeffers’ place up near Nambour.

Fortunately the pheromone for many of this insect’s close relatives had already been identified, which made our task much easier. It turned out that, almost without exception, their pheromones were confined to 4 or 5 different types of chemicals, so we knew right from the start we had a good chance of making an identification simply by putting out combinations of these components and seeing what we could catch. With each successive trapping trial we refined our blends until we had something that we were confident was an effective attractant. We tried a number of alcohols and acetates on their own and in combination and eventually found that a 90:10 ratio of the acetate to the alcohol caught more moths than any other combination. Then our chemist offered to run a sample of pheromone extracted from the gland through the GC at no charge, just to confirm that the compounds and their ratios that I’d identified in my trapping trials were similar to those in the gland. Sure enough, I had the right components and they were in the right ratio.

The next stage was to see whether we could control the insects using the pheromone as a mating disruptant. This is a typical pheromone dispenser. It’s a polyethylene tube with a wire on one side to tie around the tree and the pheromone column on the other side. This particular pheromone doesn’t have any smell that my nose can detect, although some do. One dispenser contains pheromone equivalent to about 100,000 females! We recommend putting out a 1000 per hectare, so you’re talking about the equivalent of 100,000,000 females. Now perhaps you can see why the male could get a little confused!

Sheryl How much are they?

Richard It depends on the chemicals that go into them. This is now a commercial product and I think they are selling for around $300-$400 per hectare. Bio Control is the agent for the dispensers in Australia.

We set up the trial at Nambour in an orchard with two blocks about 50 m apart. We put dispensers in one (the ‘treated’ block) but not the other (the ‘untreated’ block) and in both we put in pheromone traps. If mating disruption is going to work then males should not be able to find pheromone traps where dispensers are present. And we assume that if they can’t find a pheromone trap then they’re not going to find a female either, although there are some exceptions.  What we hoped to see in the treated block was very few or preferably no catches in the traps but plenty in the untreated block. Likewise in terms of damage, we hoped to see much less damage in the treated block than in the untreated block. The trial ran for 9 months – the adults are around for a long period in this part of the world – and we caught large numbers of moths where there were no dispensers but absolutely nothing in the traps where there were.

Dispensers were put out in September and as some damage was already evident when we started the trials, some mated females may still have been present, meaning that further damage could arise even once the dispensers had been installed. What we hoped to do was limit damage to well below that sustained in the untreated block. We conducted two damage surveys – one in December and the final one in the following June. Seventy six trees were inspected in both blocks in the first survey, of which 2.7% were damaged in the treated compared with almost 19% in the untreated block. Damage levels in the June survey were quite high in the treated block – 20.5% , but much higher – 57%, in the untreated.

A feature of this sort of control programme is that it can take a couple of years to get damage down to an acceptable level. We and the growers were quite happy with the result, providing that in subsequent years damage could be reduced even further. We’re now into the second year and have 19 growers using the technique. Time will tell whether we can push damage levels down any further, but the results are quite encouraging. One adjustment we will recommend is that instead of having only one set of dispensers go out into the orchard in the hope that it will last the entire season, we will recommend that a second set go in around New Year.

Data we collected when we first began these trials indicated that after nine months pheromone release rates had dropped to less than 4 mg/hectate/hour. When you think that for at least one species we worked with we had to keep the release rate above 6 mgs per hectare/hour for mating disruption to be effective, it may be prudent to add a second set of dispensers and keep the release rate a little higher.

There’s a closely related pest that gets into currants in Tasmania and New Zealand and we have the pheromone for that. There’s another one that’s a problem in peaches in America. Again it’s the tree that suffers – not the fruit.

Mating disruption is not a system you can use in your backyard – it’s only suitable for reasonably sized orchards.

George   I’ve tried wicks but they’re only suitable for fruit fly.

Richard The wicks contain interesting compounds. They’re called psuedo or para-pheromones because they are not actually what the males produce themselves, although the true pheromones may be derived from them after they have been ingested. Fruitfly para-pheromones are very powerful attractants.

Jim Were you using the same materials in your attraction technique in the SA examples or were you trying something different there. 

Richard The same compounds – we know it’s a different insect but I’ve not been able to get the adults I need for identification purposes.

Sheryl So what can we do for the backyard – netting? Can you put a piece of wire in and dig them out?

Richard Netting has been tried by some growers and apparently does work. However digging larvae out isn’t likely to be effective. They get pretty well into the tree and you would probably do more damage trying to dig them out. In any case I don’t think you could kill enough for it to be effective. You’re not going to get them all.

George When you dig around, how many do you see?

Richard We tend to see only singles or 2 or 3 so it’s likely that the female lays only a few eggs in any one spot. Little is known of the insect’s life cycle, but the relatively few generations a season (possibly only two) may reflect the food that the larvae are getting. You can imagine that the nutrient value of bark and wood is not as great as fruit might be, so it takes longer for the larvae to mature. The climate, at least in Queensland, means that it is warm enough to enable development to continue for much of the year, which may be why we have such an extended period during which adults are about.

Richard The larvae spend their entire life cycle in the tree. They pupate in the tree as well so there is no immature stage of the cycle that is not on the tree.

Sheryl What’s your next project?

Richard Diamondback Moth on cabbages. I mentioned at the start of the talk that pheromone could be used to bring males in to an inoculation chamber, where they become infected with a fungus that they take out and spread amongst their own population. We ran some trials about 18 months ago to test the concept and they worked quite well.  Now we want to scale up.  I’ve spent most of today writing a grant application for some funds to finance the project.

George These techniques aren’t going to work on the Fruit Piercing Moths

Richard No. However I believe Harry Faye at DPI Mareeba is about to patent an attractant for the Fruit Piercing Moth. It’s not a pheromone – it’s a food attractant. With this moth the difficulty is that they fly in to the orchard in response to the smell of the fruit, feed on it and then leave. In other words they are not resident within the orchard for very long, which doesn’t give you much time to do anything about them.  I’m generally a bit doubtful about the likelihood of food attractants succeeding, simply because there’s so much competition in the form of natural food. For this reason artificial baits have got to be much more attractive to the insect than its natural food.

Sheryl – I remember Peter Young saying that they really like Carambolas so if you put out a bait with these perhaps you can distract them.  Is there any other research happening with fruit?

Richard Geoff Waite DPI at Nambour has been working on a pheromone for Fruit Spotting Bug. When the project started six years ago the claim was made that there were six components to the pheromone, five of which had already been identified, but as far as I’m aware there is still no effective pheromone for this pest.

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Zinc is one of the most important things for plants in regards to disease resistance as it is in humans and in fact nutrition in plants and humans is just about identical. We just get ours differently – we take it in by mouth and plants take it up through the roots and sometimes through their leaves.

Sooty Mould is growing on the excretion from insects so when you see it, it means that you have an insect problem so if you see ants, the ants actually drive away the beneficial insects that kill the bad insects which cause sooty mould so if you have sooty mould, it means you have an ant problem in your tree. Put a bit of Glad Wrap around the trunk, a bit of Vaseline on the Glad Wrap or you can buy Ant Stop which goes round the trunk of the tree which stops the ants marching up and down and you’ll get rid of your sooty mould problem. This can take a while to work so if you still have problems ie you don’t have the beneficial predators, you’ll have to try an oil spray. Bio-Oil or any of the summer oils and use it at the rate of 1:100 and it’s important to put them on during the life cycle – usually the 2^ndor 3^rd week in November. Oils suffocate insects and that’s how they kill them.  If you put the oil on the tree at the wrong time of the year, it will also kill the tree so don’t use any of the oils in winter – White Oil is the worst thing you can use because it takes a long time for the tree to recover from an oil spray. The other time to do it is at the end of February or March when the other scale insects release their young. Now this period is for the Sunshine Coast – if you live up north it would be earlier or down south it would be later.

In the old days your Mum use to use washing water over the trees when we used mild soap but the soaps these days I don’t know whether I would be game to throw them on your tree!

Rootstock  The big problem with Citrus is having the Citrus on the right rootstock. Trifoliata will give 100% disease resistance against soil borne diseases and collar rot and it gives the best quality fruit. The only time it doesn’t work is if you have very salty water. Flying Dragon is a dwarfing rootstock. Troyer rootstock we use for Oranges and is a cross between Trifoliata and Sweet Orange. Bush Lemon rootstock  If you buy a tree on Rough Lemon or Citronella rootstock, it dies of disease. If you put a Lemon on Troyer, it’ll live 6-8 years – they’re not compatible. The only rootstock that Lemons are compatible with is Meyer on Trifoliata and Eureka on Benton. We guarantee our trees. When you’re on the wrong rootstock, you have all these deficiency problems because the rootstock can’t function properly supplying the top with the right nutrients so the whole key is to have the right rootstock. It use to be compulsory to have the name of the rootstock on the label, but in NSW they’ve just removed this but all our labels have this. We do about 120,000 citrus a year. Fertilise in June, August and November. 1kg of Dynamic Lifter per sq. mtr. Which gives the tree most of its trace elements that it requires then a closed handful of a mixed fertiliser eg Crop King 55 or 77 or 88 or Nitrophoska Blue.

Sour Fruit  Another question I get asked is about a good sweet Mandarin and all of a sudden the fruit have gone sour. This is Cleopatra rootstock. It’s used for the western areas where drought is a problem because this rootstock is highly drought tolerant. It won’t like the wet soil on the coast but it’s still used by a lot of nurseries which supply the western region and often in NSW so if you buy a tree, it could have this rootstock.

Figs  The time to prune is end of July and cut it at a comfortable chain saw height so what we’re trying to do is to get 2-3metres of growth each year and you’ll get figs all the way up the new growth. If you don’t prune the tree, it will lose its vigour and you’ll get short scrappy growth and small scrappy figs! They’re rampant feeders and very susceptible to nematodes so they love to be mulched with organic mulches. You can use Dynamic Lifter or any chicken manure 1-3kg per sq.mtr. Most of the cow/horse manure improve the soil pH so long as you don’t overdo it – no more than 20litres per sq.mtr of any organic manure. Mulch only once a year in the dry season – here it’s July/August but generally we usually mulch in spring on the east coast of Australia. Normally our wet season is Jan/Feb/March so we want our mulch to be broken down before the wet season comes. Fertilize every 4-6 weeks during the growing season. The best fertiliser in the business is Nitrophoska Blue – a German fertiliser – and every little pill has the fertiliser in each pill. It’s now made by Incitec in Brisbane under licence in Australia. When we buy other types of fertiliser eg Crop King 55, 77, 88 etc. we get a mixture of all the different crystals together and they separate out so when you get to the bottom of the bag, often you end up with all these fines and the course material comes to the surface so you get more variation in your nutrients. Osmocotes and Nutricotes are too expensive to use in your garden.

Mulch  I’ve got this thing about people taking their garden clippings to the dump because you don’t need to because you’re taking away all your nutrients. Buy a chipper/mulcher for around $200.00 and put all your small branches/leaves then return everything to the garden. If you have anything that’s too big, then put it under the mulch. Woody chips are very good at controlling disease in the garden because the cellulous in the hard heavy timber actually antagonises things like die-back disease eg Phytophora or pythiems then when we bash it up we destroy that celluous so a lot of farmers are putting it back under the tree whole without bashing them up – they take longer to break down of course and don’t look as nice so you hide it under the smaller branchy leafy mulch and the longer they take to break down, that’s good and you’ll find that the tree roots come up into those big heavy limbs – even Avocadoes.  Most plants love cannibalising their own vegetative material because that’s what they do in nature.

If you wanted to break it down quicker and make your own compost, you have to put nitrogen into it because the little bacteria break down the organic matter and 1 bite of nitrogen to 28 bites of organic matter so when they chew up all the nitrogen that’s in the dynamic lifter or whatever you put in, then the process stops – everything gets cold and it just sits there even if you turn it over nothing will happen so if you throw a bit of Urea or Sulphate of Ammonia, you’ll get the process starting again.

Fertilising Avocadoes  A young tree treat them like citrus. If it’s 3 years old, you wait until the fruit size is as big as your thumb and around Christmas or a bit after. Normally the secret with avocadoes is to keep the compost heap under the tree – no more than 15cm deep but avocadoes are a true rainforest tree and their feeder roots come up out of the ground and feed in the surface mulch so if you don’t want the tree to drop its fruit, then you must keep that surface mulch reasonably moist. In their native country, they have summer rainfall so if the tree stresses, it’ll start sucking water out of its fruit during the day and pump it back in at night and you’ll see these little ring necks forming on the neck of the fruit and they fall off and that’s stress so although they need to be well drained, they don’t like a lot of stress.

Fertilising Stonefruit  Normally we give them just a little bit at pruning time which should have happened in early winter – a closed handful of a mixed fertiliser just after. Calibrate your hand. Put a set of scales outside and put in 10 handfuls – shift your decimal point and it will tell you how many grams your hand is. When I was in the DPI I use to get farmers to do this. Some farmers had 300gms so if you told them to put on a handful per sq.mtr, they’d kill their trees so it’s really important to calibrate your hand. Fertilise again when the fruit are half grown and then you do it again just before harvest to help the tree fill out its buds for next year’s fruiting. It’s really important just before Christmas to chop the tree off at nose height. The reason is that you want the fruiting wood to develop below that point so it’s easy to look after and easy to harvest. If you let the tree keep on going, the framework of the tree will get out of reach and you don’t want all your fruit up high anyway.

Boron Calcium & Gypsum If you give fruit trees in general too much Boron, they go yellow and they’re very sensitive to excessive boron as are citrus. The boron in Dynamic Lifter is enough to supply a citrus tree if you use it 1kg per sq mtr for a Custard Apple tree. When you get into Avocadoes and Mangoes they need 4-5 times more than what’s in Dynamic Lifter. Calcium goes hand in hand with Boron. Gypsum supplies Calcium – it doesn’t alter your soil pH but we should be putting on at least 100gms of Gypsum per sq. mtr per year or on anything we want to fruit well. You can also do it on your Grevilleas and Banksias. Calcium is a major nutrient in our bodies and in plants as well. All the Citrus have higher calcium than Apples and apple growers are fanatical about putting Calcium on so we have to be the same with Citrus. Citrus get a dimple on the end if there’s a Calcium deficiency – it’s a rotting of the blossom end. Limes suffer from it very badly so it can be a Calcium breakdown. Capsicums and Tomatoes get a big black spot on the end. Put it on right now in winter as it takes 2-4 months to get into the tree’s root’s system. If we put on Dolomite or Lime, it takes 2-5 years!

Pruning Avocadoes are no different to any other tree. Always carry a pair of secateurs on you when you’re out in the garden. There’s a balance between top and bottom with all trees. Every time you chop a branch off, a root dies back. If you burn a root in the ground, some leaves will die back. If you want to keep your trees small, when the tree gets well established – about 5 months to get established – you can nip and tuck small amounts whenever you like so if you do that all the way through a trees life, you can keep a tree any height you want so a Hass avocado that might grow 20 mtrs tall, you can keep it down to 2-3 mtrs tall. The general rule is straight after harvest, if you want to do any major pruning, then that’s the time to do it but you don’t do it a little bit all over because that reduces your flower and fruit set for next year, you take out one or two big limbs and no more than 20% of the tree at any one time so just before flowering you can take out 1 or 2 big limbs. After 5 years, 5 x 20% equals 100% the tree is gone so it recycles itself and that pruning tip is very important. That goes for Grevillea/Hibiscus etc. this tip will keep the tree young forever.

Mangoes   Getting them to set fruit every year is a major problem because once they’ve had a dry period ie when you’re not watering or no rain and we then get a bit of rain, they’ll flower. They’ve all flowered too early this year on the Sunshine Coast. Because it’s happened very early, they’ll reflower again and the 2^nd flowering should set a crop. You can stimulate the tree to reflower in 4-6 weeks if you remove the old flowers that haven’t set. 10° for one hour on one night will completely kill every ovary in the flower. They’ll still set fruit and you’ll get pollination, the pollen tube goes down and sticks his nose into the ovary – same as in humans – the ovary is dead and the little fruit thinks it’s pollinated but because you haven’t had fertilisation, the little fruit  split and fall off so you get pollination without fertilisation. Brazil and South Africa have similar problems. If they still reflower when it’s still too cold, you can snap off the flowers over a period of time so reflowering happens over a period of time so you should get something to flower when the temperature is right. The commercial farmers all over the world particularly Israel will remove all the flowers off the lower part of the tree, then they’ll come back and do the section in the middle, then the last bit at the top so that way a 1/3 of the tree will set a crop depending on the variety. Some varieties are quite cold tolerant but unfortunately they are not available to the home gardeners. They’re tied up by big corporations.

Pruning  Light tip prune after you harvest the fruit. You can also do limb removal at this time. If you have a 100 year tree and you want to bring it down to size, the 2^nd week in October is the time to chop it off. Paint the butt with white plastic paint and it will then regrow.  When it gets to a metre, tip prune so you then have a small tree again.

Stone Fruit  Don’t prune out all the pussy wood on the inside because they fruit on their spurs. They always fruit on the previous summer’s growth. Prune 2^nd week in Oct. which is just before the fruit fly become active.

Native Bees  They do a very good job in pollinating but they don’t do well with some of the bigger flowers eg. passionfruit but they do well on citrus but it depends on the flower makeup. The Israelis have been over here taking all our native ozzie bees back because our native bees will work at temperatures when European bees won’t get out of bed!

pH  What’s important with your fish pond, pool or your own blood is your pH. If the pH is wrong in your soil, then it can’t use the fertiliser you put on so go to a Produce Agency and buying an Inoculo test kit and you get around 4,000 tests out of one test kit so share it with your neighbours so your pH should be 5.8 – 6.8pH. Most of our soils around here get down to 4-5 which is really acid so we need to put dolomite which has magnesium and calcium or lime on which you scratch into the surface. The probes you can buy to test with are only good for use in water but they’re no good for soil. Check your water pH as well.

Possums   They’re not bad to eat but I can’t eat a whole one!! Farmers are having the same problems with wallabies so you’re better off to train the ones you’ve got and they’ll keep all the others away. You can use an electric fence. Dogs will also keep them away but they’ll bark and keep you awake!

Fruit Fly  The best idea is to have an enclosed area and Netpro have a net which keeps out your mites and thrips complete. If you decide to put a net over your fruit trees and peg it down to the ground, you’ll most likely have fruit fly because they’ll still be hatching out of the soil from the previous summer so it’s important to understand the life cycle of your pests. Fruit Fly is a native pest to Qld. and the rainforest need it for survival. It’s always been here and it’s never been any worse then it was before. It use to only go down to Coffs Harbour but now that we’re growing fruit all the way down the coast, fruit fly is now down into Victoria and because they’re Qld Fruit Fly they’ve developed a cold tolerance and they’re now surviving in he south. The male and female hatch out of the ground in the spring, they hibernate in winter then mate in spring and 80% of the female fly migrates within a 40km radius of where they were born. 99% usually die out around Warwick/Gayndah and every year they get reinfected from Brisbane back yards. You’re best to just wrap a whole branch rather than the whole tree. The female lays her eggs under the skin of developing fruit and she puts in with the eggs a little bit of yeast. The fruit fly maggots can’t eat fresh fruit; they have to feed on fruit that’s breaking down so the grubs hatch out and start eating the rotten fruit. The life cycle is so quick in summer – 1 or 2 days for the eggs to hatch; 3/5/7 days depending on how hot it is for the maggots to fully develop; they crawl out of the fruit and drop onto the ground, burrow in the ground and 10 days later out emerge the adults and then the whole process starts again. So, the only way is exclusion unless you want to spray and there’s no reason to spray for fruit fly.  Palmwoods Farm and Garden Company at Palmwoods are the Australian importers of fruit fly bags and you bag each fruit and it works a treat and you can reuse them. They’re made in Japan and they have all different sizes. Fruit Fly traps usually only attract the male and there are now some that will attract both the male and female but they never get them all. When you use lures eg autolysate you’ll find it will attract all the fruit fly from your neighbourhood into your garden so if you start, you generally have to keep it going. You can spray with insecticide but best not to. The bags will also keep out the fruit piercing moth. In Feb/Mar/April the citrus will be attacked by this moth. You can also use other types of bags by just clipping the corner off to let out condensation but don’t use plastic because fruit fly will lay their eggs straight through plastic. It has to be paper.

Article collated by Sheryl Backhouse

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I’ve had about 40 years in the grape industry firstly as a table grape grower where we operated our own table grape vineyard for 23 years and we then moved from table grape growing to consultancy and contracting in the wine industry in 1990 and along the way we bought the local Post Office which my wife Heather runs. I took the precaution to learn nothing about the PO so I never have to do anything in it! I’ve had a very interesting number of years or nearly a lifetime in grapes particularly in the last few years when we picked up Sirromet Wines as our major client and for 9 years we established their vineyards, 3 of which at Ballandean are: Seven Scenes 102 ha, St Judes 24ha, Night Sky 23ha, and 12ha at Mt Cotton – a total of 400 acres. I’m sure you’re familiar with Sirromet and I hope you’ll try their wines and try their facilities at Mt. Cotton which are quite outstanding and doing something to place the Qld wine industry on the map.

There are any amount of publications on grapes as you know and one of the first things you learn is that they’re one of the major fruit crops of the world – there are more grapes grown than any other fruit crop and if you’re serious about it, we’ve got Viticulture I and II and there’s a book “Wine from a 100 Wines” if you’d like to make your own wine, this publication is all you need. The DPI put out a wine grape information kit. We also have Field Guide to Diseases; there’s also a list of all the wine grapes of the world, there’s also one for table grapes. If you want any information see www.winetitles.com.au who are based in Sydney or you could give me a call.

There is no difference between growing table grapes and wine grapes; the physiology of the vines etc. is very similar so there’s no reason why there should be much discrimination between your viticulture and table grapes and wine grapes. Not many wine makers will agree with that because wine makers are sometimes a little bit different but you might have a slight difference in crop levels etc. but generally there are marked similarities. There’s less tolerance from the States in table grapes as when you’re on the fresh fruit market and you’re trying to deal with chain stores, everything has to look pretty good these days.

Sheryl asked me to talk about what varieties are suitable for this area, as well as pests and diseases.

Your first consideration is your soil type and your temperatures and some grapes will behave better at higher temperatures than others – you would be called a warm to hot climate area whereas Stanthorpe, is a cool climate area. Incidentally, Stanthorpe has exactly the same ripening temperatures as Coonawarra and Margaret River and some of the other premium areas in Australia. What you are looking for are varieties that will be fairly tolerant to a range of soils because a number are known to have a fairly high clay content and you also want varieties that will be tolerant to rain in the growing stages but not in the ripening stage so with wine grapes, you’re looking for grapes that have loose bunches which means they dry out quicker when it has rained so when it is consistently wet you don’t want them wet any longer than necessary and I imagine some of you have heard of the 10:20 rule and that is when Downy Mildew is likely to be most prevalent ie 10ml of rain to 10 hours wet grapes and 20ºC temperature so if you get those 3 combinations you have an ideal opportunity for Downy Mildew. There is one variety that is quite resistant to 3 major diseases and that is Chombusen and that is what we planted at Mt. Cotton and it makes a reasonable red wine too. It’s not easy to sell as most people haven’t heard of it but it can be quite successful and it is either resistant or tolerant to Downy Mildew, Powdery Mildew and Botrytis which of course is one of the rots if you get berry splitting etc. at ripening so it’s really the safest one for these sorts of conditions. For red grapes, Cabernet is a much looser bunch and fairly tough in the skin and it’s reasonably tolerant to wet weather. Metaro, as the French call it, is another that is tolerant.

Diseases

There’s a very good guide put out by the DPI on a chemical program for grapes.

Powdery Mildew  Keep a regular coverage on the vine of wettable sulphur starting from bud burst
Downy Mildew   Copper Oxychloride or Mancozeb
Botrytis   http://www.sardi.sa.gov.au
Sheryl:   Organic Control:  Spray immediately after pruning with lime-sulphur or bordeaux mixture. Otherwise, during the season cut out the offending parts.

Whites:   Bordello is the most tolerant to wet weather but it’s very susceptible to Powdery Mildew so you have to be spot on with your chemicals. Other varieties like Marsanne and White Muscat which can be used as both a wine grape and table grape, Colombard is another. Keep away from Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc and Semillon because unless you’re going to pick them very early, particularly the Semillon, they can be susceptible to wet weather too. The Hunter Valley was losing their Semillon quite regularly in the old days with wet weather and somebody decided to pick them a bit earlier and that is why they are so famous today because instead of picking them at about 13% sugar, they are picking them at 10-11% and consequently they are aging so well and allegedly they are the best Semillons in Australia which was an accident of picking them early so now everyone does it. There’s probably more people here more knowledgeable than me but don’t tell everyone that!!

Table Grapes:  I still like the old Black Muscat. It does suffer wet weather damage but in these areas you’d be picking it late December so you should have it off before the rains hit in January or February. White Muscat is a nice table grape but have a go at Red Emperor which is a late grape – they grew a lot of it down in the MIA (Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area) and Mildura – it’s a very tough grape. I’d be interested to see how Red Globe, Black American. Flame Seedless which is earlier than Muscat performed here. Menindee Seedless is also worth an experiment. It’s a bit hard to get to bear but on the other hand it’s a very nice grape.

Sheryl     What do we need to do to get it to bear here?  
Peter     Lay down plenty of canes. There’s all sorts of experiments with Menindee. I’ve seen them at 18 months old get 11 kgs and a year later getting 4 bunches a panel which is 4 bunches to 5 vines so they’re very haphazard. A fellow at St George was putting all his on Sultana as a root crop and that was his way of getting them bear so I haven’t followed it up to see if it worked. There always seems to be plenty in the shops ever year so somebody must be getting on top of it. Funnily, they seem to be a lot better when they are young than when they get older. There’s a new variety out called Black American and everybody is singing its praises but I haven’t seen it yet but you should just experiment.

Sheryl     There’s a gene bank up your way.
Peter    The DPI at Applethorpe do have a planting of virus tested material and many, many different varieties.
Sheryl     Is it possible for us to get them?
Peter   Theoretically, you would get them through the Vine Improvement Association. There is an Australian Vine Improvement Association (AVIA) which is an amalgamation of half a dozen State Bodies who are charged with the responsibility of propagating virus tested and clean, planting material. AVIA has been very pro-active in importing varieties and these are then handed to the State Bodies of which there is one in Qld and we have 2 plantings plus the DPI planting which has more or less been handed over to Qld VIA and the idea was that they would then release material to nurserymen to insure that all material going out to nurseries was clean material. Grapes are riddled with viruses. They have to be self funded – they don’t get any government money and the income comes from royalties on cuttings or the cuttings they grow themselves.
Sheryl     What do growers pay per cutting?
Peter      The going rate for the dearest cutting through the VIA is 30 cents – there are 3 different grades and the reason for that is that for grafting and propagation you have different classes.

Sheryl  I have a large folio on grapes if anyone is interested in borrowing.

Heather & Peter’s B&B at Ballandean “Heather’s Cottage” has all amenities; queen size bed, spacious living area with fold down bed and open fire with plentiful wood supply, covered carport, outdoor area and lovely views, handy to attractions, wineries and restaurants but quiet and peaceful.    Ph: 4684 1300 or  4684 1147

compiled by Sheryl Backhouse

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The company is based up the Sunshine Coast at Eumundi. We promote sustainable agriculture using biological alternatives rather than chemicals. Year after year sales of pesticides and fungicides and other chemicals on a global scale, go up and up and at the same time on a worldwide scale, the amount of damage suffered by crops to insects and diseases is not going down. It’s pretty much staying constant so really, if these chemicals actually worked, then we’d see an increase in their sales and a decrease in the amount of damage inflicted in our crops, so it’s really a failed experiment. We are trying to find alternative solutions rather than using the chemical approach. The key thing we promote is nutrition, if you pump nutrition into the soil and into the plants to produce healthy soil and healthy plants, these plants are naturally resistant to disease and insect attack. That’s been fairly well proven in that if you have a very nutrient dense, minerally rich plant, then those plants are not attractive to insects.  I recommend to farmers what fertilisers they should apply to balance their soils, based on their soil tests. When you start working at our company for a few years, it’s pretty much impossible not to see a clear link between the health of our soils, the health of our plants and the health of our animals and ourselves as well. There’s a clear link between the soil health and the health of our bodies. If we don’t have nutrition and minerals in the soil then they are simply not going to get into the food chain for us to feed on and obtain adequate nutrition. We’re very much a holistic company and we look at it from a human health perspective. We’ve been going for about 10 years now and in the last year or two we’ve been moving into the human health products. When you think about it, it makes absolute logic. We’re just trying to start from the soil up and get the nutrition balanced in the soil and create a whole system for health in humans as well. So we’re all about nutrition and I’m going to talk a little bit about plants and soil nutrition and a couple of minerals which are key elements for crop quality. I have a vegie patch of my own and I think as home gardeners and hobby farmers, the reason we grow our crops is not only to save money on our grocery bill and to become self sustaining, but the key reason is, we want to grow nutritious food that we know does not have any chemicals or toxic residues on them. So it’s about growing good quality fruit and vegetables and I’ll discuss a few elements that will improve the quality of the food that you produce – not necessarily boosting yield which is the conventional approach often what the farmers get paid on, unfortunately the majority of farmers don’t get paid on quality.

Calcium The first one is Calcium and it is absolutely critical to the soil. There is no other element in the soil that is more important than Calcium and that’s because Calcium influences a whole range of chemical properties in the soil, physical properties and biological properties of that soil. There is no other element that influences those properties like Calcium does and when we’re working on a fertility restoration program and when we’re making advisory recommendations to farmers, the first thing we look at is the Calcium levels. It is the key thing and there are a few reasons for that. We have a little saying and it goes: Calcium is the trucker of all minerals. If you get good calcium levels in the soil, what happens is the soil becomes open, you get oxygen into the soil and the soil will help microbes thrive and when Calcium enters the plant, it trucks other minerals with it, so if you can get good Calcium levels into the plant, you’ll also be trucking a host of other minerals along with it. Good Calcium levels in the soil mean that you’ve got optimum conditions in the soil to get nutrients into the plant so this is very important for obvious reasons as we want minerally dense nutrient rich food. Now another other reason that Calcium is quite important is that it regulates the sap pH of the plant. Now there’s an ideal sap pH of around 6.4 and when you get very acidic plant sap, that creates conditions which favour the growth of disease organisms and we’ve yet to find a single case of any diseased plant and measure the pH of plant sap, you’ll never find a single occasion where that plant’s sap will be above 6.4 – it’s always well below. Cancer in the human body loves acidic conditions – measure the saliva pH of patients first thing in the morning and it’s very low pH and that’s the conditions that cancer thrives in as well as other diseases so Calcium helps to regulate plant sap pH as well.

Boron The next mineral that is very important is Boron and Boron is what we call the Calcium synergist in that they compliment each other. If Calcium is the trucker of all minerals then Boron is the steering wheel. Calcium will help truck our minerals into the plant but we really need Boron there to compliment that Calcium so that we can get efficient entry of all minerals into the soil. During the day the plant will be growing in the sunlight and inside the chloroplast which is where photosynthesis is taking place; during the day the plants can produce all that energy and come night-time, there’s a little trap door that opens up and all that energy and sugar is released out of the chloroplast into the leaf and to the rest of the plant for growth and energy and boron is responsible for the opening and closing of that trap door. If you don’t have the Boron levels, you’re not going to have good efficient movement of sugars and energy throughout the rest of the plant.

Phosphorus is responsible for all energy currency of the plant and is responsible for all energy processes in the plant and sugar translocation of the plant.

Magnesium is very important because the chlorophyll molecule which is where the photosynthesis is taking place or where the plant is combining carbon dioxide and water in the presence of sunlight to produce glucose or sugar which is energy which it needs to grow. This chlorophyll molecule, the essential core of that molecule which is doing all the work of the photosynthesis is the magnesium ion. It’s also got 4 Nitrogens and a whole host of other carbon, hydrogen and oxygen molecules so if you don’t have good magnesium levels in the plant, you’re not going to have good chlorophyll and if you don’t have good chlorophyll levels, your plant is not going to be able to photosynthesis very well therefore it’s not going to produce enough energy and sugars to grow healthily.

Those are the four key elements I wanted to discuss. In leaf analysis, if you can maintain those four elements right up to luxury levels, then high quality produce is the likely outcome. In a fruit tree perspective it almost becomes the big five and the other important element is Potassium and it is essential for fruiting trees and Potassium is very important for filling out the fruit. One third of the total amount of energy that the plant produces for itself for that day is taken down to the roots and exuded out into the soil so why would a plant waste one-third of its energy and dump it straight out into the soil? Well it does that for a very important reason. It supports the micro-organisms in the soil which are crucial for good crop production because the microbes to help solubilise the nutrients in the soil and make them available so that the plant can take up those minerals. So the soil micro organisms are the bridge and are essential to transport minerals from the soil. The micro organisms colonize the soil around the root system and wait for the plant to dump the sugar, which, when it’s dumped will cause the micro organisms to go into a feeding frenzy and they’ll use that sugar to solubilise the nutrients in the soil when those minerals that have been made available, the plant takes those up to help photosynthesise to produce more sugar then it can dump more sugar then it can feed more micro-organisms and so the cycle continues. The microbes are the key to having a minerally dense nutrient plant because they make these minerals available for uptake and when we start to use any chemical/pesticide/herbicide/fungicide or salt fertilisers, these substances basically bombard the microbes in the soil, salt fertilisers dehydrate them and create a very salty environment which just sucks the water out of the micro organisms. So with a lot of conventional farm systems, you move into a situation where you’re almost growing hydroponically. You’ve destroyed the microbes in the soil which are the bridge that help you to make minerals available naturally so you have to keep resorting to soluble fertilisers to keep feeding the plant. Rather than setting up a system where you need to feed the plants, let the soil feed the plant.

Compost Teas  The other boom area at the moment is compost teas where you take compost production to another level and you need to make a compost tea and put these micro organisms back into the soil because a lot of our conventional processes are degrading them. A really cheap and efficient way for you to do this is to do as Peter Cundall did on Gardening Australia and take some compost and mix it with water but what you can then do is you need 3 things: microbes, food and oxygen. It’s as simple as filling up a 20 litre bucket with water, add a handful of compost with all its micro organisms, add oxygen (a fish tank aerator) and keep it bubbling away. Then you need a food source like kelp/seaweed/liquid fish/aloe vera.  The microbes from the initial inoculant need oxygen to survive and they’ll keep feeding on those food and they’ll double their population every half hour or so and you brew this away for 12 hours – you can brew this for 24 hours but we’ve found that 12 hours is satisfactory so you end up with a super concentrated liquid inoculum packed full of these micro organisms and then you go and drench the soil and coat the leaf surface. By doing this you’ll put out all the other minerals and nutrients from the compost and feed the soil and plant so it’s a big growth industry at the moment. This makes compost a bit more realistic for farmers. We use a green manure and mulch and its contributing organic matter to the soil all the time and this in turn helps to stimulate the soil.

Sheryl asked me to mention some of our products suitable for fruit trees. One of them is called the Big Four which is the four key minerals of Calcium Phosphorous Magnesium & Boron in it. Another product is called BrixMaster which is useful for fruit tree production and it has Potassium which gives good size & sweet fruit. It was designed to raise the Brix levels in the plant which are the sugar levels so the higher sugar levels you can get in your plant, the higher the shelf life of your produce and BrixMaster is good as a foliar spray to help sugar production to get nice sweet fruit. Another product is Nutri-Store Gold which is a complete fertiliser plus trace elements plus a whole list of other inputs and it’s just a good all rounder for fruit/vegetables/turf and we put this together based on our first few years of soil tests you start to see some recurring patterns of elements that are always deficient so it has plenty of Calcium and other goodies. There’s a material commonly known as Humates – picture in your mind a prehistoric scene with dinosaurs/rainforests and the prehistoric vegetation often grew at amazing rates – massively tall and exceptional growth rates in a day and what this is linked to, is how minerally dense the soils were back in those days and our soils now have been leached and eroded particularly in Australia but back then we’re talking about young soil fresh out of a volcano. Now what happened was there was a volcanic eruption and the rainforest was covered in a layer of thin ash material and you would have sandstone and other layers built on top, and that is how coal is made. So give yourself a couple of million years so all those layers of soil and rock continue to build and compress and the prehistoric vegetation is compressed and via the removal of minerals it becomes purer and purer which is what coal is, carbon!. Before you get that severe compression you have brown coal and that’s what this Humate is – a semi-fossilized preserved plant matter which has not been squeezed so much that it’s lost all its minerals, so it has 70% carbon and trace minerals. A lot of our soils are carbon depleted. There is a mine down in Victoria where they get this and it’s used for electricity and it’s almost similar to Terra Preta – high carbon + minerals. It’s the end product of degradation. Micro-organisms love the Carbon and we’ve seen really good results using humates. We also have a black coal material that is specially composted with Calcium Phosphate with other fertilisers composted down to make a very active form of Carbon. One of the things we try and push with conventional farmers is what we call fusion farming – take some of their conventional approaches and make them more sustainable and we’re trying to introduce some organic fertiliser. We have a massive range of organic fertilisers and another 30 products we’re still trying to get certified. There is over 250 products. We do run a soil analysis service and we charge $99.00. Email me if there is anything you are particularly interested in and also check our website.

Sheryl Is Nutri-Tech totally organic?

Joel No – a lot of our farmers are not organic but we use a fusion approach. We use some conventional fertilisers and combine them with organic matter – Humic Acid – a complex Carbon molecule that when you combine some of your fertilisers, they chelate the nutrient eg Nitrogen, and will hold it in the root zone – prevent it from leaching or tying up.  There are some synthetic fertilisers that can be quite useful but it’s the overuse that is the key issue. We’re aiming for nutrient dense food that will naturally be more resistant to disease.

Marilena Do you encourage nitrogen fixing plants Joel Absolutely – many of the products we have are naturally occurring organisms, bacteria and fungus species which we try and reintroduce into the soil and some colonise the root systems and make nutrients available naturally. There’s another bacteria called Azotobacter and it’s exactly the same as the Rhizobium bacteria used with legumes – it’s a nitrogen fixer, it will pull atmospheric nitrogen out of the atmosphere but it’s a free living bacteria – it doesn’t have to form in the root nodule. It can move around as it’s free living – it can sit on the leaf surface and do the same thing and we have a whole range of microbial inoculants like that so we’re trying to get natural nitrogen and that is certainly much better for plant growth than synthetic nitrogen. There’s a bacteria called Bacillus subtilis that releases antifungal compounds so we also have a host of these biocontrol options that can suppress fungal growth. There’s also a predatory fungi which is naturally occurring and consumes other disease causing fungi by bio-control so when you see a bit of disease, you can apply this beneficial bacteria and it will eat the organism that causes the disease.

George What about phytophthora?

Joel The issue with any of these microbial inoculants is you really need to start looking at the mineral balance of your soil because if you start to use these microbial inoculants and introduce them into a soil that is not well balanced and the environment that is not hospitable for them, they are not going to survive. It’s akin to putting us on the moon – we wouldn’t survive there. You need to get good Calcium levels in your soil and improve structure as calcium opens up the soil and creates well structured soil that lets oxygen in, and oxygen is the most critical element for micro-organisms so if you have very compact soil, you’re not going to have good oxygen movement going into that soil and it will set up an anaerobic condition, an oxygen-lacking environment and it’s this anaerobic condition that will stimulate anaerobic organisms, the micro-organisms that don’t need oxygen to survive and the majority of plant disease organisms are these anaerobes so when you have very compact soil, these anaerobes will thrive and cause disease. If you can get Calcium into the soil and balance all the other minerals and you start to use inoculants like this predatory fungi, it will therefore thrive in that environment and help to suppress other diseases and yes it is particularly useful against phytophthora

 Col  Have you done anything with fruit fly? I know you experimented in your foliar sprays with herb or a chinese type product that you can’t call a pesticide but I’ve tried that as a foliar and I think once you get ripening fruit, there’s not a lot you can do other than baits but there’s been some brilliant work done overseas with splash bait technology with fruitfly that had a very low and completely safe dose of pesticide that wasn’t harmful and it was so attractive to the female fruit fly that they only used a minute amount so they didn’t spray the fruit, just as a splashbait and it was being used in Thailand with great effect and I’m astounded that it hasn’t worked its way into the system here.    I’ve used Wild May but it takes a long time to get to the stage of being effective.

Sheryl How long before you think it is effective?

Col It depends on what fruit you’ve got growing around or if you have rainforest

Joel We don’t have that specific product as such as yet but we will be having a product that will be coming on line – we’re still negotiating with the manufacturer. It’s an attractant and will kill the fly. Peter Female fruit fly need protein to produce eggs and they get this protein from the leaf and I know growers who have been controlling fruit fly by spraying the microbes onto the leaf so when the female lands on the leaf she won’t be able to get the protein from the leaf so she flies off. You also spray it on the fruit – it’s fully organic. I’m using it and the results are outstanding. I’ve seen scale just fall off trees in 2-3 weeks. You spray the leaf microbes on the leaves as a foliar protective spray and spray the soil microbes on the ground. 

Peter Wild May seems to be quite effective on my property at Mt. Tamborine – I’m surrounded by National Park so I have a huge population of fruit fly and it’s 90% – 95% effective and I was getting everything from Coffee through to Lemons being stung and this summer I’ll be using it in combination with a splash bait technique

Judy You mentioned Aloe Vera that you put it in your compost tea. What do you do this for?

Joel Aloe Vera is a fantastic fungal stimulant. Fungi in soils just love Aloe Vera. We have a fertiliser which is basically a Aloe concentrate to brew fungi. You could chop up the Aloe Vera and put it in your Compost Tea and let it brew away. I know broad acre farmers who crush it into their Compost Tea on a massive scale but they’re using a natural cactus which is around their area in Western Qld. and they’re getting similar results to Aloe Vera – it’s one of the most powerful fungal foods there is!

 George I actually use Pitaya and put it through the shredder – it produces so rapidly and I put it in the compost heap and it heats it up immediately it’s so unbelievable and it’s almost a pest!

Judy I was interested in the link between the soil and human health so if you grow all your own food all on the one property, is there a risk you could be deficient in a particular element.

Joel If the minerals are not present in the soil, then absolutely. If you’re growing well and using all the resources at your fingertips like compost/mulch/fertilisers then you should be getting as much as possible.

Judy Do you do an analysis that says your soil is OK for human health before you grow your food?

Joel Not specifically.

Judy W In the old days the way of knowing if your soil was good was you’d watch your animals to see if they were doing well and if they were, then you should be too!

Merv  Do you publish results of your work?

Joel We do with various products

Merv I was involved with a lot of biological work in Bacillus intelligensis but it never did anything and yet there are a lot of people pushing these things that seem to be a panacea but they never appear but until it’s really proven and open to scientific comment then we have to wonder.

Joel It’s a valid point and there will never ever be a silver bullet – it’s the whole picture we need to look at. There’s plenty of research out there on the Humic and fulvic acids but I guess we’ve never published any specific results on our products but we’ve sourced Humates from Victoria.

Merv The sugars you’re talking about – the tree puts a third back into the soil so I presume you mean complex sugars otherwise we should be using sugar as a fertiliser?

Joel A fair bit of both actually. The bacteria actually prefer simple sugars so yes things like sugar, molasses, fulvic acid and fresh raw tender plant materials are excellent to feed and stimulate soil bacteria. However soil fungi prefer more complex sugars like kelp, fish, humic acid and tough materials like fibrous woody bark and mulch, if you kick the surface of forest mulch, you’ll see fungi growing on it. The sugars the plant releases are not extremely complex – they’re a relatively simple but there is a bit of both really. What the plant will do is it will take a fraction of what it holds onto for itself and start to combine it with a lot of other sugars and start to produce a more complex molecule it will start to produce starches, fats, oils, amino acids and proteins. The plant will release these through the roots to encourage the fungal fraction of the soil food web.

Sheryl There’s an excellent interview with Bruce Tainio done by Graeme Sait (owner of Nutri-Tech). Graeme wrote a book called “Nutrition Rules” He spoke to various experts in their field and this is the basis of the book.

George Can you tell us a little about your background? 

Joel I studied Environmental Science for a year and decided I’d like to work with soils. I then changed to Agricultural Science and did a four year degree and all through Uni I had an interest in organic production.

Alfonso If you use too much Dolomite as a source of Calcium and Magnesium, wouldn’t it shift the pH of the soil up too high so it wouldn’t be suitable for the plants anymore?

Joel People get a bit hung up on pH in the soil for example if it’s high or if it’s low they’ll try and correct this, but if you can bring the cation balance back to where it would be, the pH will change. It’s not a case of going out and changing the pH, you want to go out and balance the minerals in the soil and that will change the pH. Magnesium has more influence on pH than Calcium to raise the pH but in high Mg soils, additions of calcium can actually reduce soil pH as the Calcium addition will replace the Magnesium and it will knock the Magnesium off the soil colloid and therefore you’ll be increase Calcium and reducing magnesium, but because of the reduction in Mg levels, the pH will actually go down because Magnesium influences the pH more than Calcium. So the real reason you can have a high pH is because you have  high Magnesium and when you get rid of that magnesium, by replacing with Calcium, you can often see a decrease in soil pH. There’ll be a short term increase in pH but over time as Calcium starts to replace the Magnesium, you’ll see a decrease in the pH.

Barbara Instead of using Lime & Dolomite, why can’t you use Gypsum for your Calcium?

Joel You can use all three. Gypsum doesn’t have as much Calcium as Lime but if you have clay soil, a bit of Gypsum is good. If you have a very low pH of around 4 or 5, often we want to avoid Gypsum in those situations because when you have a very low pH, you have a lot of hydrogen there and if you use Gypsum to try and correct that, Gypsum is Calcium Sulphate, and when the Gypsum breaks down, the Sulphates will bind with the hydrogen and form sulphuric acid which is obviously not good for plant growth.

We have courses which are pretty intense, a full 6-7 hours of learning and workshops. Mineral Management/Microbe Management/Plant Management and Pest Management. It’s a jam packed 4 day course and also includes human health presentations, manuals, organic catering and a night time dinner with a guest speaker. Ph: 5472 9900   

Sharon I’ve done the course and can highly recommend it.

Article compiled by Sheryl Backhouse

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Cedar Creek Nursery commenced in 1988 in a small backyard in Arana Hills, Brisbane. We planted 1000 seeds and the neighbour’s children and ours had great delight bagging the first seedlings. We grafted five varieties: Washington Navel, Valencias, Imperials, Ellendales and Page Mandarin and then another 10,000 seeds were planted. Retrenchment for Joe as an Engineer encouraged us to sell our trees at the North Pine Country Market. Hawkins Nursery came and bought from us and our family business has grown into what it is today.  Our two sons Michael and David are partners and we have growers from Cairns Emerald Gayndah and Mundubbera who regularly purchase for their orchards. Trees cannot move from Qld. to the other States because of the Citrus Canker. In Emerald more budwood was illegally bought in and the virus has destroyed thousands of trees in the hope of eradicating the disease. It’s still not known if it is controlled. The industry has been driven to improve the quality of fruit. The Imperial, Ellendale and Murcotts are competing with the large overseas market. Since 1986, varieties have been imported from overseas in the hope that a better eating variety of mandarin, orange and lemon would be found. Many varieties you may have heard of recently released are: Afourer, Daisy & Sunburst Mandarins; Navelina & Midnight Oranges and Verna & Limoneira Lemons. The low seeded Murcott has been the latest development as well as the low seeded Lemon. Everyone is very cautious and all are awaiting DPI inspections. The industry is at a standstill at the moment with the citrus canker outbreak. How did we learn it all? We go to International Conferences, we talk to people and we try everything.  The Encore, although we grow it, will never become a commercial variety and the reason is that it comes in late and it comes into the fruit fly season and hangs onto the tree and that’s the advantage of it. I was eating Encore in NZ in March at the Research Station. Daisy can also hang on the tree for six weeks. We also discovered that top-working Citrus trees are a waste of time for the professional grower.

Rootstocks

The main rootstock for Imperial has been Troyer because it gives a heavy yield. The problem is that the rootstock grows over the graft and the fruit quality diminishes within 8 years and the trees need to be replaced. Commercial orchards now plant a new tree in-between and remove the older tree after twelve years. Cleopatra is another favoured rootstock for Imperials. It is susceptible to root disease and likes only sandy loam. Volkneriana has replaced the old Rough Lemon. Murcottts are less sweet and Eureka Lemons have smoother skin on the new rootstock. To overcome the cincture of Imperials on Troyer, we have been using an inter-stock of Valencia or Sweet Orange. Hopefully, this will produce better fruit and a longer lasting tree.

Planting out your tree 

Sheryl  The books say that citrus is shallow rooted but they’re not at our place! We tried to pull a couple out – not even with the car!

Jenny They’re not deep compared with say a macadamia and I’ve heard they’re no more than 1 metre and a lemon would have the most extensive root system but what they mean is that Citrus are surface bearers. People put on a lot of mulch. Keep the mulch away until the tree has been in the ground for 2-3 months and is firm in the ground and don’t put any mulch in with the soil when you cover it with dirt as it might not have broken down properly and it will burn the roots and that is why some trees go yellow!! You need to get air/sunlight/water to get those roots going. I wouldn’t mulch a citrus tree for at least 6 months if I could help it. Water in well so all the air pockets are gone. Our trees wouldn’t need fertiliser for six months and the leaf is the answer to when you need to do something. When we use to live in Brisbane, we only had to fertilise our trees when it started to fruit heavily and it only needs a lot when it gets to 3 years. (Jenny, others say they only fertilise after fruiting) If the leaf is falling off, something is burning the tree or it’s too dry. It’s only when it leaches out that you need to replace it. I’ve been up to Gayndah and I’ve had growers say to me that their trees aren’t growing so I’ve dug the tree up and the plastic’s still on! When you buy any tree and it doesn’t matter whether it’s a Mango/Lychee etc. my advice is to get the tree and cut it right across the bottom so if it’s been sitting on gravel etc. the roots may be twisted. Another problem we encounter is that people don’t get their soil tested before they start to plant out and one chap whose trees weren’t growing had really salty soil when we tested it. Never take things for granted. When we plant our seed, we plant them in polystyrene boxes which we paint inside with Copper mixed with white household paint so that when the roots get down to the bottom, the Copper burns the bottom of the roots so you end up with a fibrous root system. We might grow 500,000 seedlings for 100,000. We have a huge throw out. You don’t want anything inferior – you want everything straight and all those fibrous roots at the beginning. We guarantee that our trees will grow. When we put them in the bag a year later, you have your top roots at the top and they keep branching out so when you break all this mix away, they’re not tangled. We pay $66.00 a cubic metre for this mix and the reason is we know we will never have Phytophthora and we guarantee that you will have a good tree. We put our money into the root system – it doesn’t matter how small the top is. If you don’t have a proper root system, then you’ve wasted your money. You won’t get the problems if it’s growing in the ground properly.

Matt  If you do get a root bound tree, can you cut off all that root?

Jenny  Yes, cut off the bottom, pull the bag up and leave it over the base of your tree which is the rootstock.  If you keep the black plastic there, you’re not getting all the suckers developing on your rootstock. When you disturb all these roots, the rootstock is going to start growing and this method stops you banging the mower against the tree and will stop any wildlife like hares from attacking the trunk of the tree. If you’re putting on the oil and the copper, you will have a healthy leaf because the Copper is going to treat the roots whether it’s in clay/sand/rock – you’re treating the whole tree.  If you’re putting the oil to cover the leaf  ¼ % mix the two together and coat the whole so the insects are fooled. If your leaf is not healthy, it’s because you’re not treating the roots because the roots are not absorbing the Copper because you haven’t kept the leaves healthy. So what I’m asking you to do which is very cost effective is get some Norshshield or other copper product which is very cheap – get some oil and mix them together and do this every 10 days especially when it’s wet from October to March. If you keep your tree healthy your leaf will be healthy and you won’t need to use any insecticides. You won’t have a zinc or magnesium problem. There’s a chap I know who goes out every night and sprays his trees with Molasses & water every night I’ve never seen a bug on his place ever. Check out the internet for the rate.

Sheryl The bugs don’t like the stickiness.

Jenny With gall wasp, the DPI say to spray the last week in November and the 1^st week in December so if put oil on your trees at these times, that will get rid of your gall wasp.

George Fungus doesn’t like zinc so if you keep your levels up, your tree is healthy.

Jenny We haven’t had to put any zinc on the trees but it comes back to good drainage. If you have bad drainage, and you get over-watering, you’ll run into problems with your zinc. We get a lot of good bugs like the Assassin Bugs/Ladybirds.

Fertilise In winter when it’s cold the leaves can’t absorb anything so the root system have gone to sleep so usually in winter you’ll see the signs where they’re not absorbing magnesium and that’s when you start getting symptoms of yellow blotching.

Sheryl What do you think of foliar fertiliser?

Jenny We’ve tried foliar fertiliser but we don’t believe that’s it’s very effective. We’re looking to spend $10,000 on this Longlife Fertiliser but if you miss putting on fertiliser and the tree needs it, you’re holding the tree back so if you have a fertiliser in there that’s releasing  all the time, you’re a `step ahead. We also put fertiliser through the water. We might put Calcium through one day and Potassium the next.

George Do you get leaf analysis?

Jenny We use to have it all done but we do it ourselves now. If you get the experts out and they take a little bit of the potting mix and they go and test it and you’ve got 100,000 trees and your watering system that sprays inside to out, not all trees are getting the same amount of watering, it’s a nightmare. You have to judge looking at the leaf. The inside tree is going to look different to the tree on the outside. If you put a little fertiliser on every month from August to April, you’ll have continual growth. We use Nitrophoska Blue.  

Frost  Up the coast we grow everything out in the open so if we have a tree flushing in May and we get a cold winter, the frost can kill the trees. The frost will affect soft growth so if you have hard growth you won’t have a problem so we’ll stop fertilising in April

Pruning  Do you know you’re suppose to keep the centre of your tree aerated so keep it open. 

Jenny I’ve spoken to experts on Fruit Fly and they say the worst problem is tomatoes. We eradicated tomatoes on our place and perhaps that’s why we don’t have fruit fly problem this year.

George We grow Tomatoes but our citrus don’t get touched at all.

Sheryl  Jenny has invited us up again.  They want to get into breeding different varieties and they’ll show us how to cross-pollinate so we’ll plan on a visit when the trees are flowering in September.

Jenny   What we are looking for at the moment is a Mandarin that has a consistent colour. If you are growing your trees in Emerald for example, it’s very hard to get a deep red colour. They’re a pale yellow colour because of the heat. The market loves red so if you get a deep orangy colour, people go for it. We’re trying to reduce the number of seeds, the dryness and have a more consistent size in the Mandarin and we’re doing this by crossing flowers. If you want to go commercial, put in some Tahatitian Limes in a small way. You want them to be fruiting from July – Nov. 

Peter It’s too late. The Mango growers have bulldozed all their trees and have put in Limes.

Jenny It seems to be who you know but the cooking shows are all recommending Limes. You can bring on flowering in citrus by cutting watering. 

John Why are shop bought Mandarins terrible.

Sheryl I think it’s because they’ve had too much water pumped into them so the sugars are diluted.

Jenny  I know one grower who sprays his Murcotts to keep them green as he wants to pick them in November when the price is high. They use to spray Ellendales with a certain chemical to get the sweetness into the fruit because they were picked too green and the sugar to acid ratio is really difficult to work from season to season so that’s why it has become a difficult piece of fruit to market. The DPI did a lot of work on the low seeded Murcott. We took the budwood to Indooroopilly and they radiated the seeds. From radiating the budwood, they were grown on in 1998, and they’ve come up with this low seeded Murcott. They’re now down to around 5 seeds per fruit. There are tighter restrictions today but eventually there will be better fruit in the shop.

Murray I have a friend who has a fruit juice shop at Brookside and he buys Hickson because he gets more juice out of them than Oranges and he has no trouble selling them. We juice our Mandarins and it freezes well for at least 6 months.

George We find the best tasting juice is Tangelo. 

Jenny We juice then heat it to 70º and it bottles well – keeps for 3 months at least.  

Sheryl:  Jenny and her two sons, David and Michael, run Cedar Creek Nursery, 470 Cedar Creek Road, Belli Park Qld 4562. Located approx. 2 hours north of Brisbane. It is a specialist wholesale nursery – visiting by appointment only. Ph: 07 5447 0101. email: cedarcreek@skymesh.com.au

Article compiled by Sheryl Backhouse

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Frank sells his nestboxes commercially – you can contact him at the Australian Nestbox Company, 81 Haig St, Gordon Park  4031 Ph:  3857.1086  email:  ozbox@powerup.com.au

Sheryl has asked me to give a talk on using insectivorous bats to control the Fruit Spotting Bug and the Fruit Piercing Moth.  I am going to restrict my comments to my particular area of interest, which is animals that breed or roost in tree hollows.  Hollow-using birds may not have much to offer you in controlling caterpillars on trees or moths that are active at night.  Dollar birds are insectivorous but they are strictly hunters of the air.

There are two groups of hollow-users that would be an advantage.  The first group consists of the gliding possums.  Feathertail gliders, the smallest of the group, eat nectar, pollen, manna (an insect exudate), sap, small insects, foliage and blossoms.  They are communal animals that forage through foliage looking for food.  Imagine an army of these pouring over your trees every night devouring every insect that they find.  Feathertails are tiny and could probably fit through a hole the size of a 10 cent piece.  Roosts of up to 16 individuals have been found.  Larger gliders that also occur in south-east Queensland include the sugar glider and the squirrel glider.  Food is similar to the feathertail but the numbers of individuals living together is much smaller. The problem with gliders is that if you don’t already have them, there is not much that you can do about it.  But if you do have them they can be encouraged by providing roosting sites – gliders readily accept artificial hollows.

The second group of hollow-users offers more to a greater number of people and I am referring to the various species of insectivorous bat.  These are not flying foxes and they are definitely not fruit-eaters.  Nor are they anything like as big, with some being no larger than a 50 cent piece.  There are 23 species of microbats in our part of Australia and, because there are so few caves, most roost in tree hollows.  Some species fly high and fast, taking insects on the wing.  There are other species whose speciality is the middle or lower layers of a forest.  Some are adapted to rainforest where they flutter like butterflies.  Several pick insects off foliage while others even hunt on the ground.

Of the studies that have been done, moths can constitute a large part of their diet – up to 90% for some local species.  There are some reports of microbats being used in the USA for farm pest-control and I would like to read a part of an article in a Bat Conservation International newsletter about a farmer’s experience with bats controlling pests:  “The multitude of birds and the growing colony of bats at his farm have taken care of his original concern about overuse of pesticides in his orchards – he has gone from spraying 13 times a year to only twice and that being after the birds and bats have gone.  His hunch about bats helping with his corn ear-worm problem has paid off.  Where he used to have 1-4 of destructive moth larvae on an average ear of corn, he has had none for the last several years ever since his bat population began increasing.” 

So what can be done to encourage microbats?  There seem to be two types of bat roosts.  Males often roost singly and they can make do behind exfoliating bark and in a myriad of other places.  Females, on the other hand, form maternity colonies in spring which require largish hollows.  Most batboxes target these maternity colonies.

There are many different recommended designs for batboxes. There is one design from Wales with a V shape and a slot entrance at the base.  The Americans favour two very large sheets placed parallel with each other but separated by only a few centimetres.  In Europe, batboxes made from concrete are not uncommon.  We are presently using a British design made from ply which is chunky but quite small – about 12cm x 10cm x 9cm. Most boxes seem to use a slot in the base as entrance, typically 12mm to 30mm wide.  All batboxes need a rough surface inside for the bats to cling to. Some use parallel saw cuts as grooves.  Others tack shade cloth onto the interior walls.  I now scour the ply with a laminate cutter.

Another thing that most people agree on is that there should be no clutter around the box.  My theory is that foliage breaks up their echo-location and makes it harder for them to locate an entrance.  There are less guidelines about the temperature aspects of siting a box.  Where bats migrate, they typically go cold in winter and return to warmer areas in summer.  There is logic to this in that food is frequently scarce in winter and many bats need to go into torpor for their food reserves to last the distance.  Only when it is really cold can they do this.  In addition, there are many reports of bats in roofs and under metal caps on the top of electricity poles – very hot places which they seem not to mind at all.  How this influences the siting of batboxes in sub-tropical areas is still unclear.

That batboxes can make a difference is indicated by Australia’s only longitudinal study of batboxes.  The first boxes were installed in Organ Pipes National Park, outside Melbourne, about 10 years ago.  The park was declared because of a geological feature and contained no trees 30 years ago when the first plantings began, so there are no natural hollows.  It took 3 years for the first boxes to be occupied.  There are now 35 batboxes installed and a resident population of over 100 bats and about 6 different species. 

Unfortunately that is about the only real data available in Australia on batboxes.  A lot of individuals have tried batboxes with variable success but there seems to have been little attempt to distill some firm conclusions from their experiences.  My belief at present, based on what I have heard and seen, is that batbox shape may not be that important.  The width of the entrance slit probably is but perhaps not critical.  The main determinant of success could be the number of boxes involved.  At Organ Pipes the maternity colonies relocate between boxes nightly, and the most popular box is in the centre of a cluster.  This suggests that bats may need several roosts sites in a cluster and could explain why so many single batboxes aren’t successful.

As with any good idea, there are going to be problems.  For gliders, we now hide the entrance to the box at the back of the box to discourage competition from birds.  While this has been totally successful, it has made the box irresistible to the European honeybee – a feral animal.  We are trialling placing a piece of carpet on the inside of the lid but it is too early to say if this will work.  For batboxes, the main problem has been ants, the sort that weaves nests in leaves.  These are native ants but it makes for rather an expensive antbox.  Broadleaf trees are the worst, with least infestations where the boxes are mounted on smooth-bark eucalypts.  At Organ Pipes, ant infestations are treated with a liberal sprinkling of Johnsons Baby Powder.  Another idea that I have not yet tried is to place lengths of black pvc tubing in the tree to see if the ants prefer that instead. 

Article compiled by Sheryl Backhouse

 Some extra facts about Microbats by Jenny Awbery

• Microbats (microchiropterans) are small bats found all over the world. 
• The majority of bats are microbats. 
• Most microbats eat insects – for example, up to 600 mosquitoes in one night. 
• Microbats have very poor eyesight and use highly sophisticated echolocation, or radar, to find their food. That is why their ears are very large and their eyes are small. 
• Microbats need a warm home – the temperature needs to be between 80 and 90 degrees F. That is why many bats live together in caves. 
• Microbats also can live in trees, buildings and houses if the temperature is between 80 – 90 degrees F.