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:

Solomon sojourn

Digby has now been in the Solomon Islands for three weeks as part of an Ausaid project to improve the availability and quality of fruit in the local markets. He will be running workshops throughout the country in fruit tree propagation and introducing new species and varieties of appropriate fruit trees. This note gives an idea of current events. "I'm sitting at the bar in Gizo hotel looking out into the bay. Thunder rolling on Kolombangara island, rain just setting in for the evening. Been two weeks now getting set for the training with visits to farmers and research stations and tomorrow it should all come together in the first workshop. Agriculture people, staff and farmers appearing around the town with lots of chatter between wantoks (one talks, people from same language groups). English, pidgin and home language all mixing freely.My personal tension rising, but solbrew is light enough to calm". Digby

Bud Grafting a Seedling