Love is the fruit of marriage
Post Type: Blog Post
Love is the fruit of marriage.
Just over 12 months ago we celebrated our wedding day surrounded by our Community of family and friends. We all worked together to make it the most special memorable day. In addition to their love and support our guests made a very kind donation to a tree fund which allowed us to invest in around 70 fruit trees that were planted on our 10 acre property as part of a sustainable future for our family. We planted many different varieties to perhaps to highlight a growing opportunity for our farm.
Running our business on the land the ‘fruits of our labour’ have come in so many forms. A fruiting tree to me seems one of nature’s biggest rewards and for seemingly limited input, just our will for it to grow, Well that has been our initial approach anyway! Every tree was planted lovingly accompanied by high quality worm castings made available to us from our worm farm.
we mass planted around 70 small trees, our 7 year old daughter was amazed as we told her what she could expect to receive from them in the future. Of course she asked how long it would take and was disappointed with our answer. How quickly time goes! Spring has sprung!
Unexpectedly the winner by far is the two tropical peach trees we planted beside each other for them to cross pollinate. They hit the ground running and quickly formed into large trees seemingly overnight. We watched as their glossy green leaves disappeared in Autumn and a twiggy skeleton remained that blossomed cute little pink flowers. Early spring healthy looking leaves returned followed by little green balls of hope. Both trees were laden with hundreds of fruit. Terrified of losing such a great gift to our family by insect attack, particularly fruit fly we completely netted both trees which worked well. We never spotted any fruit fly and only a few fruits were damaged by birds who cleverly got inside the netting. We were so excited to receive big sweet juicy white peaches with not a mark on them. We picked them when the skin was vibrant in colour and the fruit was slightly soft and smelt delicious! I wish there was a way we could share them all with you! They have been a proud addition to our lunchboxes, fruit platters and I have been particularly enjoying white peach flavoured kombucha!
Our citrus fruits were expected to take well and haven’t disappointed we have many green signs of fruits and are expecting a big harvest that I will be sure to report on.
We decided to pot the Australian native finger limes best described as natures caviar and they have also done very well. They are still green for now but are of good size. We couldn’t help tasting one, the citrus bursts are quite bitter and taste very limey at the moment but we can tell they will be ahh-mazing!
It hasn’t all been this exciting. We have been very time poor this year, a new baby, booming business, extreme summer temperatures, drought and goat attack! The trees have mostly had to fend for themselves and some are no longer with us. See the list we planted below.
1x Macadamia, 2x tropical peaches, 1x Bush plum, 2x Pears, 2x Nectarine, 4x Finger limes, 14x Avocados, 2x Apricots, 3x Plums, 4x Apples trees, 6x Grape vines, 1x Kiwi fruit vine, 2x Navel oranges, 2x Mandarins, 6x Blueberries, 2x Blood Navel oranges, 1x Cherry tree, 1x Logan Berry, 1x Lime, 1x Tahitian Lime, 4x Arabica Coffee plants, 1x lemon, 1x curry tree,2x Davidson Plumbs, 2x persimmons