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| It is a magical time of year |
Last year about this time, our
first employee had just walked off the job.
After a month of work he sent us an abusive email and never came back. We had just started a spring spraying regime
with little understanding of the scale of the challenge 12 hectares of orchard
would present, we had grafted two blocks of trees and our builder was contemplating
building our house. It was a tough time,
and although Julian was a wonderful motivation, there were times when I seriously
thought about walking away from the idea of horticulture altogether. It wasn’t that we couldn’t do it. It was that as things stood we couldn’t do it
well, and while we try not to let perfect be the enemy of good, we knew that we couldn't even manage to get to "not shit".
Twelve months on and that employee
leaving meant we had enough capital to buy a new tractor and sprayer, we have
downsized the orchard significantly with more downsizing to come, our grafts
are looking sensational, we have grafted more, and we are living in our very
own farm house. It is amazing the change
that has occurred on our farm and in our lives.
We have a clearer vision of where we are going, and how we are going to
get there.
It starts off with growing fewer
apples, but growing them better. It introduces
expanded plans for more livestock. It
becomes a farm that we can run ourselves, without having to rely on employees,
except for the labour intensive work of thinning and picking the apples. It ends as a place where we can share our
passion with other people - those interested in horticulture, food, experiences
and the importance of these things in our families and community.
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| "Early pink" as the flowers start to emerge |
The plan will change, plans always
do, and it will be a long road which has bumps on the way. We will have days where a pig dies (like
today), where we lose lambs (like last month), and where it hurts and we doubt ourselves. But we will do it, and as we go
along the road we will share both our wins and our losses with you. This isn’t about showing the perfect, it’s
giving you a chance to share in the reality. We hope you want to come along for
the ride.
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| Here come the flowers |
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| Getting rid of this.... |
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| ...so we can take better care of this. |
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| You have to know what gives you energy, and looking at these is what does it for me |
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| 12 months on, and the grafts are little trees... |
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| ...with fruit buds on a few! |
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| The rhubarb is flowering, just looking at our new vege garden gets me excited for the year ahead. |
As regular readers know, we drop the occasional bombshell in at the end of our blog posts just to see who is reading them. In that spirit we would like to announce that Coreen is pregnant again. How did we find time to make THAT happen?
