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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August - blue skies and warming up

This month reminds me of the reason why I love Cape Trib and choose to live here. Great swimming and sunbaking weather. Even the chooks are sunbaking.

The vegetable garden is thriving and the fruit trees are starting to bud. The Jaboticaba are flowering, the Malay Roseapples are feeding the bats, and the first Durians are now budding. We are eating our first Abiu for the season - beautiful creme caramel flavours that I had nearly forgotten.

The young cassowary teenagers are now starting to appear around the house on their own. Dad is off courting the female in the next valley. The teenagers seem very vulnerable, and nervous.

The large lace monitors are now stalking the chickens and raiding the chicken house for the eggs.

Big rains in July - an unusual event

Last wednesday it started to rain and continued through the night, into Thursday night. 312 mm in 48 hours. The causeways flooded and the road was cut for most of Thursday .

We had a German family staying with us, who were due to depart, so we rang their hire car company Hertz, who were quite happy for them to leave the hire car at Cape Trib, so that Digby could take them to Cairns in the 4WD, and then get another hire car for the rest of their holiday.

The other guests - Anna and her son Ian were not so lucky. They had hired a car with Thrifty who said that if they left the car at Cape Trib, they would still be charged for the hire, and that there were no cars available to replace the car at cape trib anyway. So we offered them the Granny Flat, so that we could get the cottages ready for the next guests in case they arrived through the day driving a big 4 WD. Anna and Ian went off to explore and made the mistake of crossing the first creek, and then couldn't get back to the farm, when the river came up, so they finished up staying at Coconut Beach Resort for the night, and came back to see me the next morning.

Our new guests for Thursday night failed to appear, and then rang to say they were staying the night further south at Daintree Wilderness Lodge. This meant I had Thursday night to myself - all alone with the dogs - what joy.

Now the creeks are running again, the sun has started to peak out from the clouds, and the weather forecast looks promising.

Cape Tribulation is a rainforest wilderness, remote and the weather is unpredictable. That's why this area has never been settled into suburbia before. That's the attraction - the reason why we live here. The orchard is thriving - after such a long dry last year, this is a wonderful bonus. It might be a record breaking July - maybe the wettest July on record. I checked Hans' rainfall record which go back to 1980 and for July - and the biggest rainfall 222 mm in 1997, so it looks like this could be the case.

(This photo has been taken by Deep Forest Lodge and shows a photo from the wet season)

Birds battling it out

The Macleay honeyeater defends its food source - the very ripe and squishy black sapote - from the attacking Lewin honeyeater. The fruit has been picked and the orchard food supply is finished, so they have moved into the house to get the ripe fruit here. Some great photos.

Honey Eaters at the house eating Black Sapote