We are now a CERTIFIED ORGANIC farm

After 2 farm audits conducted over the last 9 months, we now can call ourselves CERTIFIED ORGANIC. Any one can use the word 'organic' but a farm which has been certified organic has met strict standards and these have been judged by an outside auditor.

Our farm practices have always been organic, but we have never bothered to become certified while our mangosteens were young and not producing. We are now hoping for harvests of several tonnes, and it was time to go and get our farm practices made official.

There wasn't much we actually had to change. The main thing we have had to do is stop using cardboard for mulch around the fruit trees. In the past we always collected the cardboard boxes from the resorts and used them for weed control - very effective too. But the coloured ink on the boxes can be a contaminant - with high mercury in the inks, so we have had to change over to a special black weed mat called 'weed gunnel'. This seems to be working well and lasts longer than cardboard.

This means we are now in a position to be able to sell our mangosteens as certified organic throughout Australia and overseas. Big step forward.

My first dugong sighting

On Sunday Digby and I paddled our sea kayaks north to Emmagen Creek. On the return journey, the pointy bit of my boat nearly collided with a dugong. It was crossing in front of the kayak, diving out of the water and then plunging. It was so close I felt I could almost touch it. In twenty years of living here, I have never seen a dugong and to see one so close - WOW! what a privilege.

The tail flashed before me - it was like a miniature whale - and the mermaid like tail gives rise to the legends about 'mermaids'.

Learn more about dugongs

New Video - Tasting Jakfruit

New video - What's on the tasting today?

Stripey Possum visits the cottage

Next to the B&B cottage is an Ice Cream Bean – a huge legume tree with wonderful boughs, and long thick beans with seeds inside them – loved by the local children and enjoyed by fruit tasters as something different.

This seedling is now 6 metres high and it shouldn’t be there – it blocks the view from the balcony to the mountain –in the avenue to the cottage.

Our guests sitting on the balcony late one evening hear a scratching in the boughs of the ice-cream bean, shine the torch to the sound and there looking down on them is a tiny Stripey Possum.

These possums are relatively rare – in the twenty years I have lived here I have only seen 3 – one in a tree only 3 metres away from this location. It is an animal that the guides search for on night walks and rarely find.

The irony is wonderful. Our guests are driving twenty minutes south to do a nightwalk with a guide, who is looking for stripey possums to show them. They don’t see one on the nightwalk, and then return home around 10.30 pm and there is the stripey.

It is there for the next four nights – arriving at about 7.30 and loitering for a couple of hours to feed on the beans.

I want it all

I have just found this hilarious story from two travellers who did the fruit tasting on our farm, and thought others might enjoy it too. Here is an extract:

The first thing I noticed about the land cruiser that came to take us to the farm was that it had a snorkel. Cars should not have snorkels. Cars are not boats.

Walking the Bibbulman Track from end to end

Over 2 months - February and March, we walked the Bibbulman Track from Albany to Perth in Western australia, taking 52 days, and travelling nearly 1000 km on foot. There are campsites located approximately every 20 kms. Here is our story as a slideshow. We are thrilled to be home, and already planning our next walk! - either the Larapinta Trail or the Appalachian Trail