Introducing ... Kelly, who has been converting an ex-dairy farm into a biodiverse and productive mini-farm heavily influenced by permaculture principles. Read the case study in Summer - Week 13.

Giving each individual fruit tree in your garden an identifying name or number will help you to monitor each tree and track its progress. It will also make doing your Grow Great Fruit homework easier! Find the activity in Autumn - Week 5.

Catsear is a perennial, low-lying edible herb often found in lawns. It’s native to Europe, but is pretty much found all over the world. It can be invasive, but has not been listed as a weed of significance in Australia. Read the article in Sum [...]

If you’re lucky enough to have cherry trees, you may be getting very close to harvesting the first of the crop, depending on where you live. At our farm in central Victoria, the earliest varieties are normally picked around the middle of Novem [...]

As with all fruit, cherries are most nutritious if eaten straight away, but there are many different ways of preserving them that also preserve a substantial amount of the nutrients, making it a very worthwhile way of providing nutrition for y [...]

It’s easy to see the beginnings of the modern cherry pitter in this patent, filed in 1901 by Jesse Crandall of Brooklyn, New York, for a combined cherry pitter and fork. Read the article in Summer - Week 11

Chickweed is considered to be one of the ‘alternative’ herbs, which means it acts as a catalyst on the action of other plants. It is an extremely useful plant both for eating and for treating a wide range of conditions. Chooks also love it (an [...]

Chill factor is something unique to where you live, and describes the number of hours your fruit trees will spend below 7°C each winter. Some fruit trees require either low, medium, or high chill, so it’s good to know the typical chill factor [...]

When you buy trees from a nursery, days or weeks before you buy them they will have been lifted from the soil in which they grew, and then ‘heeled in’, which means they’ve been stored in sawdust, loose soil or some other medium to stop their r [...]

Birds are one of the biggest problems faced by fruit growers - and one of the hardest to deal with! Deterrents may work on some species of birds, but usually not for long. Some of the best ones may even work  for an entire fruit season, but of [...]

Do you make your own compost? If not, what are the limiting factors...lack of space, knowledge, time, experience or materials? With a little planning, it’s possible to come up with a system that suits every garden and gardener. Read the articl [...]

Spring is a great time to clean out your pantry, in preparation for the coming fruit season. Doing a bit of a stocktake and audit will give you some good feedback about which preserves you need to make more (or less) of next year. Read article [...]