The season is turning and our beautiful fruit trees are starting to lose their leaves and go dormant for the winter. Katie and Merv have been out amongst them, counting up how many trees of what variety are a good size to sell and loading the information onto the...
To keep the vampires away! Garlic is an important marker for us Gung Hoes. It was the first crop we ever planted back in April 2015 when Mel and I first started leasing land off Katie and Hugh. It’s one of those optimistic crops. We plant it as the soil is...
As an orchard kid I grew up familiar with the concept of grafting – I knew that all the fruit trees in the orchard had been grafted, but until I decided to take up the orchard business almost 20 years ago I had no idea how, or why. Nor did I realise that...
If you’ve been following us for a while you’ll know that we’re creating a very exciting new collaborative farming model on our farm—currently called the Harcourt Organic Farming Alliance, or HOFA (we may change the name to something a bit more...
One of the challenges for farmers is to find the time and resources for professional development. For most of us, there’s no defined career development pathway, so it’s something we have to figure out for ourselves. First, find the conference, workshop or...
Yes, it’s true, this year’s Australian Network of Organic Orchardists (ANOO) conference (yep, all of us) was asked to leave the cafe where we were holding our meetings (you can see from the photo what a rowdy bunch we are) after the management decided we...
