The Crossroads

We have been at a crossroads about our apples.  In one direction, we were looking at continuing to grow apples as a commercial venture.  In the other, we remove the rest of the orchard, keeping a bit for ourselves, walk away from the idea that we could make a go of the apple game, and focus on livestock.

For a couple of pretty positive and optimistic people, it took a lot to bring us to this point, but three months of dreading the rain because of the disease pressures it would bring did a lot of the driving.  I spent over a dozen 13-hour days on the tractor spraying in this period, though not a single one of these days passed without a breakdown, either of my sprayer or my tractor.  These breakdowns added to our stress, as the organic orchard is unforgiving when it comes to timing of sprays.

We thought about just going over to spray free, but an unhealthy monoculture is still a monoculture, and black spot will deform your fruit, reduce how much you grow, and damage the health of the trees, not to mention the effects of codling moth, wooly aphid, and powdery mildew.

The Christmas period gave us a good opportunity to step back and weigh all these things up, and for now we have decided to continue to grow apples commercially.  But for this to happen, a few things need to change.  Firstly we need to remove more of the orchard.  We have decided that we want to care for 9 hectares of apples, and do the best that is possible with just the two of us, not look after 12 hectares while doing a bad job of it because we are overextended.  So reducing the amount of orchard we have retained is an important part of this.  We may go further, but this is where it will be for now.

The other thing that needed to change was our equipment.  Breakdowns are going to happen, but they will happen more often with gear that is 20 years old that has been poorly maintained (if at all).  And the simple fact is the organic orchard doesn’t forgive delays, for any reason.  So we bit the bullet and invested in new equipment, specifically a new tractor and a new sprayer.  The tractor will change my work environment for the better (especially in the rain and during the hayfever season), and the new sprayer will reduce the amount of time we spend filling by a third, a time saving of about one and a half hours every day we spray.  Plus, they should all but eliminate breakdowns.  And we always have the old tractor and sprayer there as backup there as well.  I hesitated a bit writing this post, as people can be a bit weird when you buy new gear, a bit of that green-eyed monster that lives in small towns I guess.  But we have it, there's no point denying it, so we may as well move on with our farming.

It was a big investment, one that we hope pays dividends in our apple futures.  But before we can think about our apple futures we still have to deal with our apples present.  This season’s harvest will start in earnest in about two weeks.  I hope we can cope, we picked virtually no bins last year, and should be doing over 500 this year!  Well, there is only one way to find out… stay tuned.

It is a Landini, an 85 horsepower orchard tractor

Hopefully it will be the boy's someday

For him to have an apple future, we had to do it!

Mind the gap!

Well we certainly haven’t been sitting on our backsides the last couple of months, but I know that we have been slack in the blogging department.  I will do my best to cover the gap, so make your cup of tea/coffee/scotch/gin/cider now and get settled, this will be a wordy one.  But read through, I promise you may learn a thing or two!

As you could see from our last post we had been milling quite a bit of timber. We’ve finished that off and now have a great deal of working material stacked and racked.  Some of the stuff that came out of the mill was so impressive we earmarked it for future furniture.  I still have to cover all of it to keep it out of the elements, but once that is done we will have a resource that will last us years.  The only question we have to answer now is: what do we want to build first?

Father and son on the wood pile having some morning tea

The orchard really kicked up a gear in September and has continued to go beserk in October.  At the end of August we hired someone to come help us knock it into shape, and even though after four weeks they didn’t work out as an employee their efforts in preparing two of our blocks for grafting was great.  We estimate that approximately 2,500 trees were cut down and mulched up, with wound paint applied to every cut to stop the trees getting diseases through the cuts.  It really was a herculean effort, and set us up beautifully for grafting.

The "Hinchinbrook" block, freshly cut and grafted

Now, to the grafting…. it is a strange thing to cut one tree down, take a little stick of another tree, make a few cuts to it, wedge it into the bark of the first tree, and then have it grow.  But this is essentially what happens.  We had two legends of the game, Clem and Boxer, who are 74 and 71 years old respectively, come down and do our grafting.  Now this didn’t mean that Coreen and I could kick back with beer and skittles, it was our job to follow them along, taping the grafts so they wouldn’t blow over or come out, and putting wax around the joins so no air or moisture could get in and cause the graft not to take.  These guys are so fast, they put on about 1,300 grafts a day, that’s about 650 trees that we needed to tape and wax.  They would finish their day at 3pm, after just ambling along since 9am, and Cor and I would be there until 6:30pm trying to finish before dark.  It was a real lesson that first day, so for the next couple of days we roped in some help, but then by day four we ran out of friends (our “friends” learn quick!) and it was just back to us again.  When they are really moving these guys can have up to 6 people working to try to keep up with them.

Boxer and Clem, having a break and letting us catch up (just a bit)

We had a wonderful time working with Clem and Boxer, despite working hard the jokes flew thick and fast between us, and they took time out to show us how to graft.  They even gave us grafting homework over a weekend and came and inspected it on the Monday to make sure we had done it right.  Lucky we have plenty of trees to practice on!  It was absolutely brilliant, and I still have a bit of scion wood from four heritage varieties courtesy of the Steenholdts (who have been in apples for decades) that we hope to graft onto some hand-picked trees.  Boxer even brought five of his favourite varieties and grafted them for us.  We are certainly going to have quite a range of tasty apples for you to try when you visit!

All done, Matt with Clem and Boxer

Such a strange thing to turn this into new apple trees

In other apple matters, we have had a bit of an issue with our equipment, namely our orchard sprayer.  I bought it last year and it seemed to do the job OK, but when I pulled it out and gave it a test run a week before I was due to start spraying it failed dramatically.  After waiting a week I then spent a few days up to my elbows in grease at the mechanic’s trying to help them get it fixed as they were snowed under with work.  It took about 4 weeks (during which time we had to borrow a sprayer from a good, good friend) but finally it is now back and working.  The failure taught me that it probably wasn’t working properly even last year, but after much time, effort and sadly, money, it is now working great.  We spent more than the sprayer cost in the first place fixing it, and though the thought of buying a replacement did play on my mind, the total cost is still less than the price of a fancy new one that is likely too big for our orchard in any case.

Mad Matt, the Orchard Warrior

A quick word on spraying. “But aren’t you going organic, how can you use sprays?”  This is a common misperception about organic farming.  There are actually a number of chemicals approved for use in organic farming.  In the USA the list is actually so big it is a little scary, but the gist of the thing is that it must be a natural product.  So that means we use chemicals like lime, sulphur, copper, certain oils and products containing natural bacteria to help us manage our pest issues.  However even naturally-occurring products can have dire consequences for nature and the soil biology, for example pyrethrum and boron kills beneficial insects like bees, and copper or excess sulphur can destroy microorganisms living in healthy soil.  This means that even an organic farmer has to make choices about what substances they are comfortable using, and why.  We have less to choose from, but that doesn’t mean it is simple!

The apple flowers are out in force now, and so are the bees, and we are hoping for a much, much better harvest than last year.

So the weekdays have been getting our apples going, and our weekends have been dedicated to other “projects”, whether it is getting the sheep shorn or setting up new pig paddocks.

We had a very sad Saturday when Matthew, Sadie and Hedley came over to bid farewell to the old boar Peter Pan.  We only had one sow large enough to handle Peter Pan, the wonderful Tinkerbell.  As Tinks is on her last litter and we want to have more sows, keeping Pan for sentimentality’s sake just didn’t make sense.  We tried to find another home for him but to no avail.  We had a friend come over with his firearm and do the deed, and fortunately our excavator was on hand to bury the big lad.  It was a sad occasion.  Pan had sired many a litter and was a really great pig.  I will always laugh at the memory of him curiously following our friend Mark around his pen, with Mark running away crying “Razorback!”

In case you were wondering, we didn’t turn Pan into sausages because old boars can develop a musty smell in their meat, and with Pan you could smell him whenever Tinks was around, so we knew it wasn’t a starter.  Have you learned anything new today? ;)

Anyway, with the big fella away Sadie brought over one of his offspring, Tess, who was pregnant to their new boar (Barry).  Just a few days after Pan “went to Disneyland” Tinkerbell had her litter, followed in short order by Tess.  So we have 13 beautiful saddleback piglets running about currently.  The seven-month-old weaners are getting to a good size, we will have five of them for the chop and we are eagerly planning a salami and charcuterie day with our old WWOOFer host Mandy.  Between that and the fresh pork, we are going to eat well this summer!

Say hello to Tess!

...and her litter!

Tinks is on her last litter at the moment, but is loving her new paddocks

All the pig action was an impetus for us to set up new paddocks, and I am quite chuffed with the new setup.  My catch cry while we were doing it was “a wallow and scratching post in every paddock”, in a real effort to facilitate the “pigness of the pig”, and to let them do what comes naturally.  It warms the heart to see a happy pig, when you come visit I am sure you will see what I mean!

Love the happy pigs!

On the sheep front we have shorn, docked, tagged and clipped so many that my head still spins.  And of course the busy month was the perfect cue for one of the Wiltshire girls to reject her lamb, meaning that we have been bottle feeding one of those as well.  Normally I wouldn’t have been prepared to do it (having gone through it with shish kaBob last year!), but at the time Mary was one of only two female lambs, and we really want to grow our Wiltshire herd so needed to keep her around.  So bottle feeding every four hours it had to be!

Clipping hooves

That's a lot of wool, more than 3 bags full!

The other baby, little Julian, is also going well.  He is a happy little guy, pretty content to be at the farm, in his capsule or pram under a tree while we work.  He smiles a lot, is always looking around for me, and is fascinated by the brilliant quilt full of farm scenes that our friend Jane made.  I am not sure I am ready for him to be crawling, but hopefully by the time that happens we will have moved into our house on the farm, which Ernie started work on just this past Monday.  We live in exciting times.

Such a happy lad!

So there you have it, a month and a half in review, and I haven’t even told you what we have planned for this month!  I guess you will just have to wait and see.  Of course, you could come down to Our Mates’ Farm and find out firsthand!  Don’t worry, we won’t make you work…. much!

And now a few final pictures for you all...

One of Tinkerbell's piglets sneaks a drink while she has breakfast

The runner ducks have started laying... I see omelettes in my future, lots of omelettes!

This guy and a couple of others have been hanging around the pig paddocks

The working men of the family don't make it to bed