Warming Winter Cumquat and Almond Cake
As anyone who grows their own food knows, it's incredibly satisfying creating dishes from ingredients from your own garden. So we got double pleasure making this cake using home-grown cumquats and almonds. The first step was picking the cumquats. The almonds were...
How to Plant a Fruit Tree
It's nitty gritty time! Time to get on the end of a shovel, dig a hole, and plant your fruit tree. We often see fruit trees tied to elaborate staking arrangements, but if you plant them the right way, there's no need for stakes at all, your tree should be totally...
How to choose a good fruit tree
If you're going to plant fruit trees this winter (and haven't ordered any from Carr's Organic Fruit Tree Nursery), then it's time to be either getting your order in (they close on June 30), or thinking about buying trees from a nursery as stocks are starting to run...
Fancy a cup of compost tea?
We're always banging on about soil being the foundation of your entire food growing system, and how important it is to be constantly improving it. So one of the common questions we're asked, is "how?" There are lots of techniques available to help you improve soil,...
How to tell the difference between fruit buds and leaf buds
Last week's blog post about "Know the parts of your fruit tree" led to a flurry of questions about the difference between leaf buds and fruit buds, so that's today's blog topic. It's definitely a very useful thing to know before you start making any pruning cuts,...
3 Ways to Improve Your Soil
Do you think about soil much, or is it just something you walk around on, or maybe try to grow something in? If you're already a keen gardener and have had fruit trees or a vegie patch for a while, you're probably already aware of how important soil is, and (like Hugh...
How old are the fruit trees we sell in our nursery?
Katie in front of Carr's Organic Fruit Tree Nursery This is a very common question from people looking to buy a fruit tree from Carr's Organic Fruit Tree Nursery, particularly at this time of year before orders close on June 30. An apple tree seedling in the nursery...
Know the parts of your fruit tree
Have you started your winter pruning? If the leaves have fallen off your apple, pear, plum, peach or nectarine trees, now's the time to get started. We talk a lot about pruning (because we know it worries more than 50% of home growers), so we thought we'd share...
Fruit tree leaves: bonus or problem?
Here's a question we're often asked: as the leaves fall off your fruit trees, is it OK to let them rot on the ground, or are you potentially creating a disease problem? There's often not a simple answer to these questions, and in fact issues like this need to be...
9 Step Process for Preserving Fruit
Before the days of refrigeration and a supermarket on every corner, preserving fruit (and other food) was a matter of necessity. Knowing and using lots of different methods of storing those essential nutrients to see us through winter was second nature, particularly...
How to Provide Frost Shelter for Fruit Trees
We've written about frost and fruit trees before and noted the importance of providing shelter for some fruit trees in spring, which is the danger time when a heavy frost can damage flowers, tiny fruit, or even drop-bears. Our resident drop-bear on a freezing cold...
Managing your fruit trees and frost
The question of frost and fruit trees often comes up when people are deciding which fruit trees to plant in their garden, so we thought we'd clarify the issue this week, particularly as we've had the first few frosty mornings here on the farm. Winter frosts are not a...
