A poem to celebrate the completion of the new packing shed

Journey of a lifetime - By Alison Gotts

Who would have thought it would take twenty one years?
I could have raised a child,
Become a barrister or a town planner.
Instead I chose to be
A mangosteen nurse-maid.
Twenty one years - weeding, feeding, weeding, feeding.
Don’t forget the whipper-snipping
Five whipper-snippers - four slashers - three tractors
Weeding, feeding, weeding, feeding
Feb 99 - Cyclone Rona
Her eye on our orchard
A message received in Tasmania
Gotts, your property destroyed by cyclone
Two hours to get from the front gate to the house
Breadfruit trees like toothpicks
Durian trees -  that dream is dead
The lychee screwed out of the ground and gone
Mangosteens still standing
Leaning at 45 degrees in heavy rain
Get them up – stake them
Thanks Gill and Kellie
That job wasn’t in the house-sitting agreement
Chainsaws, cutting, loading, clearing,
Day after day, month after month.
Am I too old for this?
What if it happens again?
October 2000 - petals on the ground
The first flower
Mangosteens at last
Eleven years hoping
More years creep by - the fruit dribbles out
Hoping, waiting, weeding, feeding
April 2006 - a small commercial crop
Don’t complain
5,000 bucks is better than a kick in the pants
Raining, raining, hoping, waiting, weeding, feeding
No crop – too wet
Is this how I want to spend my life?
Waiting for fruit that never comes
September 2009 - Hot – too hot – no rain
Trees start dying
Brown leaves - dead branches
Stress – mine and theirs
I didn’t plant these trees to die
Heavy rain at last
Flowers - more flowers
Three flowers on one stalk
Twenty one years of waiting
Here it is – so many fruit
Every tree loaded
How to pick them all?
Get organized
Ladders, scales, boxes, pickers,
New packing shed
Paint it purple
Count down to zero
February ‘10
Twenty one years of waiting
Ready for a new journey
FREEEEDOM!

Repairing erosion after the flood with gabions

Last January our creek overflowed its banks, and the walls of the creek undermined our driveway, very close to the house. We discovered that this could be repaired using Gabions - strong wire baskets wired together and filled with rocks and built in stacks, each layer slightly overlapping the layer underneath.It has taken nearly a year to get to this job. Here you can see Digby with Suzy and Alistair, two WWOOFAS from Scotland who are spending Christmas with us, starting the rock layering. Very hot work.

Recipe for mango salsa to serve with grilled prawns

This recipe is a winner - we tried it at our staff christmas party and it tasted excellent. . Serve mango salsa on the side with prawns or duck breast or scallops. We ate the salsa with cooked prawns - the hot spicy and sweet flavour of the salso worked well with the prawns. The recipe comes from Stephanie Alexander - 'The Cook's Companion'. Thankyou Stephanie!

Mango salsa

Ingredients
1 mango peeled and diced
2 slices of red onion chopped very finely
1 fresh red chilli, seeded and finely chopped
1/4 cup of chopped fresh mint leaves
2 tablespoons fresh lime juice
2 tablespoons olive oil
salt
freshly ground black pepper

Method
Combine all ingredients and allow to stand for several hours before using.
We think that vietnamese mint would work well instead of normal mint too.

Drinking Mango Bellinis for Xmas

A christmas celebration with all our workers - we couldnt do it without the team.

Make a soursop daiquiri for christmas - here is the recipe

Prepare the fruit to get the juice
The soursop should be avocado soft but not squishy. Hold the fruit with one hand and peel away the skin with other hand. Once you have removed as much skin as possible, break the ripe fruit open, and remove the core and the flesh with your hands. Place the flesh in a mouli or a sieve and push the fruit through the mesh so that the seeds and pulp are left behind and the juice is collected underneath.

The cocktail ingredients
60 ml juice, as prepared above
45 ml bacardi rum
15 ml white curacao
5-8 ice cubes
a maraschino cherry for decoration

Method
Place all ingregients in a blender and blend until smooth, pour into a large cocktail galss and decorate with cherry. Yum!

Soursop Juice

We are currently researching a new product to add to our jams - soursop juice. We have received many requests for fresh soursop and juice from people looking for the fruit as a medication against cancer. Research has shown that the fruit, the bark and the leaves all have medicinal properties and anti-oxidants which have shown promise against cancer cells.

It is very difficult to send fresh soursop to the market as it is very perishable. It is also difficult to preserve the juice without adding sugar. We have imported a large pressure cooker from the US and completed a trial batch of bottling the juice and then heating it to extremely high temperatures to kill the bacteria. We are still testing the product to determine its USE BY date, but it appears to be at least a couple of months.

Hopefully this product may meet some of the requests we receive.

Tourism Award Winner

This year we decided to enter the Tourism Tropical North Queensland Tourism Awards in the categories Hosted Accommodation and Ecotourism. We were finalists in both sections but did not win either section. Instead we received the Judges Commendation Award. It was a lot of work to write the 30 page applications, host the judges on the farm, and attend two interviews, and it made us really think about our business and our achievements over the last year. We appreciate the judges recognising our efforts and commending us. It was good to get dressed up and have a great night out meeting everyone from the tourism industry

Congrats to Winners who were also from the Daintree:
Tourist Attraction - Daintree Discovery Centre
Ecotourism - Jungle Surfing
Hosted Accommodation - Red Mill House

Breakfast fruit platter in October

 

From left the fruit is soursop, solo papaya with lime, star apple, mangosteen, sugar bananas - this is part of our breakfast which is served to our guests on the verandah of their cottage each morning

Ugrade completed of our self-guided walk

Time for a celebration, after a full week working to upgrade the walking trail in our forest, and replace lost markers. Here are some of the local characters who joined us to celebrate with a glass of champagne - on the trail of course. Many thanks to our wwoofa - anna who did all the hard work, and took this photo.

Visit by spanish celebrity chef

Yesterday I had Miguel Maestre and a three man film crew roaming around in my orchard and vegetable garden filming miguel 'discovering' fruit on the trees, cutting it open and tasting it in front of the camera.

This is part of a television series - 13 episodes called Tropical Kitchen. The show has already been bought by the lifestyle channel to screen in australia next year.I must say that I was a bit apprehensive - with two days notice - but we were able to set up filming opps for soursop, star apple and jaboticaba. Miguel was also thrilled with the kaffir limes and the leaves which he said tasted hundred times better than the ones he can buy in Sydney. We missed the actual cooking of the recipe - the boys took the ingregients and ran to film some rainforest shots before it got too dark.

Miguel reminded me of Jamie Oliver - with all the boyish enthusiasm for food and flavours. But he also had very strong charisma and it was great fun watching him perform for the camera. He tried to herd my chickens into the screen shot but they werent cooperating,

For more info about Miguel I found this on the internet

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Stinging tree surprise

Three weeks ago I was weeding the path behind the back door, and was stung by a stinging tree. This came as a complete surprise - my first time - and this was the last place you would expect to find a stinging tree. It was masquerading as a weed amongst a few other interlopers on the stone pathway. I pulled it out with great gusto and it stung me hard - both on the back of the fingers and on the palm - and I dropped it quickly.The seedling was only about 10cm high and had 4 leaves, but a close up look showed all the fine needlelike hairs that cause the pain. A bird must have dropped the seed on a fly-by.


This was my first sting. It had taken 20 years of living here to have this experience. There was immediate intense pain, and it continued for a few hours. When I tried to wash my hands, the water wetting the hand made the pain even more intense. For three days it was really bad - you were aware of it all the time. Then it gradually disappeared, until you wet your hands.

Now three weeks later I can say I have survived, and there are only minor twinges - a gentle reminder when I wet my hands.

Babies love Black Sapote

 

Bees triumph over Green Ants

Last week, our sole remaining beehive was attacked by a green ant nest. It was a massive onslaught, enabled by the grease drying out on the legs of the stand which holds the hive. Normally the grease is sticky and gooey, and the green ants can't get past it. But the grease had dried out and formed a skin, so the green ant colony moved into battle with the bees. When I found it, the situation was gruesome - there were dead bees being carried away from the hive by the ants, and as bees arrived at the entrance to the hive, thousands of green ants were waiting to attack them and drag them off.

I rushed back to the house to get a brush to try and sweep the ants away, and a grease gun to redo the gooey defence on the four legs of the stand. I swept away all the ants on the outside of the hive and off the stand. Standing there in shorts and t-shirt without my bee suit, I realised that this might not be such a good idea, especially as all the ants on the ground were biting and attacking my feet which only had sandals. I bent over and listened to the hive - no sound. Normally there should be a hum. I crouched down and looked through the crack at the back of the hive on the base - all I could see were bees on the backs struggling with the green ants which had overwhelmed in far greater numbers. The hive was completely riddled with green ants, and dead bees.

When Digby arrived home an hour later, he kitted up with beesuit and smoker and took the lid off the hive. NO BEES! The hive was dead.

We were quite depressed as we had already lost another hive which had deserted while we were away for May bushwalking. Now we realise that the same thing probably happened to them.

The next afternoon on the orchard tour, a few of the people noticed a swarm of bees on the Sapodilla tree, about 50 metres from the hive - the swarm had settled on a branch. We got terrible excited - the bees had survived the attack by leaving the hive. The Queen would have made the move, and all the colony would have followed her.

Now the problem was to get the bees back into the hive. We went over all the frames in the hive and brushed off the green ants which had moved into the honeycomb. In the brood frames, there were larvae hatching as we brushed. This was amazing to see bee legs, then a bee head emerge from a bee cell. Once the hive was green ant free, and greased thoroughly on the legs of the stand, Digby took a large plastic bag and a pair of secateurs to the swarm. Wearing his bee suit, he nonchalantly trimmed the leaves, around the swarm and scooped the open plastic bag up and around the swarm and sealed the neck. It was an amazing catch of the swarm. He cut off the branch and then carefully carried the bag of bees back to the hive, lifted the lid, turned the bag inside out into the hive and slammed the lid back on the hive. It was just getting dark, and hopefully the bees would settle down overnight.

Sure enough, the next morning the bees were at the entrance coming and going, the hive was humming, and a plastic bag peeped out from the entrance. Once again donning the beesuit, Digby removed the lid, and gently took out the plastic bag - all the bees had moved from the bag back on to the beeframes.

A week later and the hive is still going well. We live in hope

Rambai Fruit in April

Close up of the rambai fruit on the branch

The drooping rambai branches look spectacular.

These are the female trees which bear the fruit

Each rambai has three segments. The flesh clings to the seed.

Learn more about rambai at http://www.capetrib.com.au/rambai.htm

Preserving salaks

In January we took some salaks to David and Mala who run the Hot Wok Indonesian restaurant [now renamed to Indonesian Bistro]at Atherton on the Tablelands. Mala decided to preserve them and then over Easter visited us at Cape Tribulation and brought some preserved salaks for us to try.

Here is a sample. They have been cooked until tender - test with a fork - with cinnamon and cloves. It tasted a bit like stewed apple. She had frozen the salaks until she was ready to preserve them and this turned out to be a bad idea as the structure of the fruit broke down too much. So we know for the next crop. And we have found a local market for our salak fruit.

Fruit in Season for April

Here are some of the fruit around in April - from the left - Rollinia, Lime, Soursop,Yellow Mangosteen, Mamey Sapote,Salak and Rambutan

Flood Video

I have put the video clips and some photos together to capture the essence of the flood we experienced in January, and posted it to youtube.

Flash flood wipes out our nursery

We have just spent the last ten days cleaning up after heavy rains caused flash flooding . We received 435 mm in a 12 hour period, and the river next to the house burst its banks and then a 2 metre wave flowed down the creek at a hundred miles an hour and straight through the house and garden area.

The nursery was a disaster. The flood carried away more than 2000 plants in pots in the nursery, and deposited silt in thick layers around the house. In some places the silt was more than a foot deep, and pot plants were buried. Using a small spade to dig them out, we actually did recover some of the precious grafted stock that I had been working on over the last few months.

Empty pots are strewn along the creek bank below the nursery, and they are even washing up on the beach which is more than a kilometer away.

Here are some photos to give you an idea: