Gummosis is more of a symptom than a disease, but can give some useful clues as to what’s going on in your fruit trees. It may indicate your tree has a fungal disease, a bacterial disease, a root fungus or has suffered physical or environmenta [...]

By choosing varieties that ripen sequentially, you can plan your garden to yield fruit over a long period. Other considerations that can help you achieve a long harvest include space, pollination, multigrafts, and creating microclimates in you [...]

Native to Europe, northwest Africa and western Asia, Hawthorn is now common around the world. It has traditionally been used as a hedge in rural areas, and these days it’s often seen associated with fence lines. In countries where it’s an intr [...]

A little bit of preserved lemon goes a long way, but adds an incredible extra flavour to a dish. It’s often used in meat dishes, but here’s one of our favourites, that suits both vegetarians and vegans. Get the recipe in Winter - Week 9.

Even in an organic garden or orchard, sometimes you need to spray, for both pests and diseases, and also for applying products like compost tea. Having the right equipment for the job not only keeps you safer, but makes the job both more effic [...]

Keeping good records is an important part of growing great fruit. This article explains what to look for, and how to record it. Read the article in Spring - Week 1.

Keyline is an important farming technique being used to restore the landscape on many Australian farms, but believe it or not, it also has application in your garden! Most gardens are too small to contemplate ploughing, but understanding the i [...]

Drainage is an important issue for fruit trees, and periods of heavy rain provide the perfect opportunity to see how good your drainage is. Although some trees tolerate it better than others, they will never thrive on a site where the water do [...]

Too little water, and your trees won’t thrive, and might drop their fruit. Too much, and it’s easy to flush the nutrients away from the root zone. Deciding when to water can be as simple as checking the soil beneath the tree to see if it feels [...]

If your garden is frost prone, it may damage your fruit trees in spring, when they are vulnerable, and can lead to the loss of fruit. Understanding how frost works, and how it affects fruit trees, can help you to plan your garden to grow bount [...]

Healthy gardens thrive on biodiversity, which is just a fancy way of describing having a big variety of all living things in the garden – trees, shrubs, herbs, flowers, birds, insects and microbes. Plants we often call ‘weeds’ help to create b [...]

Apples have been grown for hundreds, if not thousands of years, and have long been valued as a source of nutrition and vitamins in winter. These days we can eat apples all year due to storage in coolstores using modern technology...but how wer [...]