We’ve had some mighty winds over the fruit season. We live in a very windy spot here on Mount Alexander – it can often be completely still in the valley below us, but blowing a gale up here on the farm. Wind has a bit of a bad reputation when it...
Have you ever gone to pick your beautiful apple crop and found this inside? It’s internal browning, and it’s pretty gross. When it’s this advanced, it makes the apples completely inedible. It’s not that uncommon to see it in apples that are...
In these days of climate variability, farming is becoming increasingly unpredictable. In the last 20 years we’ve had the worst drought, the worst flood and the wettest spring on record! Summers have become searingly hot, with temperature records being broken all...
Hopefully you’ll never need this information, but if this summer is anything to go by, fires are a growing risk. We’ve had a fire in our orchard, so we want to share our experience about how to help your trees recover. Watching the fire burn through the...
We had a great question from one of our Grow Great Fruit members about what causes russet on apples, which describes both the yellow marks (as you can see on the side of this Cox’s Orange Pippin apple), and the rough brown marks around the stem end of the apple....
The concept of “no waste” is one of the permaculture principles that makes the most sense to us, because it’s how we’ve always tended to live on the farm. Wasting as little as possible seems obvious to us (and probably to you, too), so...
