Cyclone Ingrid threat

They said it was the first time since 1918 that a category 5 cyclone had threatened the Queensland coast and it was heading our way, with destructive winds forecast in 24 hours with winds over 320 kms per hour. I walked through the orchard that afternoon and looked at all the fruit on the trees. It was exactly 5 years since we had been wiped out by Cyclone Rona - you can see some of the photos on the farm section of our website. I thought - tomorrow all this will be one big mess - and we will be back to square one again. I'm getting too old for this now - I remember that it took 3 months of solid clean up to get the orchard back on its feet and we had to have a huge replanting program to fill in the gaps. Now it was going to happen again.

The good news is that during the night the cyclone veered north and has crossed the coast north of Cooktown. So we are lucky for now. But it still might come back. It has been raining all day without stopping which is nice.

Digby is elected as President of the Rare Fruits Council of Australia

I think we might have bitten off a bit more than we can chew. Last weekend Digby was elected as president of the RFCA and I am now the secretary. This role is to bring all the RFCA branches in QLD together to work out how we can best share information and promote rare fruit. We have put forward a vision of building a website and moving to technology to overcome distance and communication problems. Many members are not computer literate so this will be a challenge.

Rainfall for February 2005

The average rainfall for February is about 800 mls at Cape Trib. This Feb we have only had 150 mls for the whole month and most of this fell in a 3 day burst. This is a worry as we need the ground water to be replenished - otherwise irrigation in august will be impossible.