Neighbour's horse eats our Abiu crop

People ask us what pests we have in the orchard.

I never thought that 'horse' would be on the list. A golden palomino who lives a few blocks away has decided our place is better than his, and he has moved in to feast on the abius. He eats everything - including the skin, and the seeds. The process is a bit tricky for him because he can't actually hold the fruit while he eats it - a bit like playing bob apple. The fruit bounces around on his nose until he can get his teeth into it.

I always get sticky lips from eating abiu from the latex near the skin. Considering the amount of fruit he has eaten, his lips will surely stick together. I suppose we will have lots of little seedlings germinating in horsey poo all over the orchard too.

Digby went out and madly picked as many Abiu as he could at 'horse height' so that he could sell them to Mossman before the horse got the whole crop. Spurred into action so to speak.

We are still waiting fingers crossed

Three hundred and fifty mature Mangosteen trees should be loaded with flowers by now. Alas - one tree with 6 flowers and that is IT! Last year the flowering was late too, and the trees burst into bud in the first week of January.

Trees need to be stressed for several months before they flower - Digby thinks they have not had enough stress this year. The tree has to make a decision to either flower or flush. The sad news is that we now have about tweny trees flushing. So these won't be flowering for sure.

We have a sinking feeling that over the next week, all our trees will flush and burst with new foliage.

Don't count your Mangosteens before they hatch!

Digby in the solomons

For the last 2o days and counting Digs has been roaming around the solomon islands looking at fruit trees and designing a fruit tree project for AusAid which will start next year. This photo shows digby teaching a grafting workshop in Oecussi, East Timor in 2005. Looks like there will be more of this in store for him in 2007 in the solomons

Tourist torments our baby croc

It's pretty special living in a wilderness area where you can see animals living in their natural habitat. There has been a small crocodile living in the estuary of Mason Creek for at least 4 years, and all the locals have kept an eye on it over the years. Then a tourist decides to torment it.

Read the story here: http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/stupid-stefaan-meets-allan-the-croc/2006/11/09/1162661802875.html

I have been rung by the Sydney Morning Herald and the Sunday Mail about the croc attack. I said the croc was being tormented in its own habitat, that this is a wilderness area where seeing/ living with animals in the wild is part of being here, and that it should not be taken away to a croc farm.
Read day 2 of the story:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/allan-the-crocs-on-the-run/2006/11/10/1162661886516.html

Yesterday while National Parks rangers were in the creek area which they closed off to everyone else - a large gunshot was heard coming from the area. They are denying that they have shot it - but nobody else had a gun and was shooting at that time. I guess the truth will come out eventually.

Vanilla flowers and soap suds

Our vanilla vines have flowered for the first time.

While the bore driller was here we asked him to recondition our existing bore which has been in use for ten years. We think it has become silted up a bit with clay particles over this time and we hope that cleaning out may give us a better flow rate.


Pulling the bore pump out of the bore hole 30 metres below the surface took a huge effort. Once it was cleaned, we had all sorts of dramas being able to stuff it back into the hole. Poor Digs - he could get it back in OK but not the last metre of the pipe and in trying to force it, the wires broke so the pump didnt work. Three times the bore pump was pulled up from 30 metres below. A huge physical effort. He developed a system using the car and a pulley after the second attempt. The final solution was to cut the last metre of pipe off so it would fit back into the hole. We were using our back up system for 3 days before we finally switched back to the bore pump.

Bore Driller finds water

The bore driller arrived on the farm this week after three years of us waiting and hoping that some day soon a drill rig would make its way across the Daintree River and over the Alexandra Range.

We had to join forces with our neighbours Colin and Dawn to share the cost of freighting the drill rig over the last range on a huge semi loader, as the rig could not negotiate the grades on its own. This was a big gamble because we had to pay this cost whether or not he found any water.

We have not had enough water to irrigate our trees for the October November period. There is such a slow rate of flow coming out of our existing bore that many of our mature Mangosteens defoliated last January under the stress of the dry. We just could not pump enough water out of the bore to save them. We pumped for an hour and then we would have to wait another hour for the bore hole to fill up again and then we could pump for another half hour.

The bore site has been chosen as the old well - the place where Digby and I hand dug a well 12 metres deep in the early nineties. He drilled down through the old well to 20 metres and we found water. The interesting thing to know was that if we had persevered with our hand digging for another 2 meters we would have found permanent water. Isn't hindsight a wonderful thing!

We have been told we now have a flow of 4,000 gallons an hour at a depth of 13 - 18 metres below the surface. If this is true it means that our irrigation problems are over.

 

It's a miracle!

It has been wonderful to have Miracle Fruit (Synsepalum dulcificum) on the tasting again. The pulp from the fruit has the ability to affect the sour receptors of the taste buds so that all sour foods taste sweet. Watching people's faces as they discover that their taste buds have changed and that the lime now tastes as sweet as an orange. Wow! I am now collecting the seeds and hoping to plant out a large number of miracle fruit bushes. This is a small red berry from West Africa and it should make a perfect pot plant for the shadehouse. Multi national corporations have tried to analyse and synthesize the flesh to use as a safe sugar substitute, but have not been successful.


The Durian has been frozen from our crop in March and April. We are surprised how well this fruit has survived in the freezer. We know Durian is an aquired taste - but in each tasting there is a group of adventurouse folk who like the new taste and hopefully will go on to try a fresh durian.


For those of you thinking about doing the fruit tasting this month, the fruit we are offering:
Breadruit
Black Sapote
Durian
Yellow Sapote
Star Apple
Soursop
Abiu
Jaboticaba
Roseapple
Pommelo
Solo Papaya
Grumichama
Miracle Fruit

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