Biochar is one of the most useful soil additives you can use, and while you can add it any time of year (like compost), autumn is a great time to do it before your trees go to sleep in winter, to boost the organic matter in your soil and provide more habitat to help...
Apart from all the fruits that are grown commercially in the orchards on our farm, we also have a pretty big garden, with a wide variety of fruit and nut trees, including 8 almond trees (2 each of 4 different varieties) under net. We’re big fans of nut trees in...
If you still have fruit on your trees this summer, you may have seen this type of damage on it. It’s caused by grasshoppers (or more unusually, locusts), which can become quite a problem from about mid-summer onward. A locust on the window of our packing shed...
We had the pleasure a while ago of visiting Sunny Creek Organic berry farm in Gippsland, and spent a happy afternoon touring the farm and picking berry farmer Phil’s brain. Not that we’re planning to start a berry farm! But we’ve grown raspberries...
One of the diseases it’s important to monitor at this time of the year is Brown rot. In our part of the world (in southern Australia), our typically hot, dry conditions don’t usually favour the disease, but the recent rainy weather has meant that Ant has...
We want to talk about Leaf curl. It’s a common fungal disease of peach and nectarine trees (if you have leaves curling in other types of trees it’s caused by something else). It may seem strange to be talking about it so late in summer, as it’s a...
