I took my phone with me to take photos and was devastated when the battery ran out because i was unable to get pics to document with graphics just how wonderful it was!
Our tour of his farm began with looking at the bees. It started raining as soon as we got there, so it was perfect to be undercover watching the bees in some degree of haste flying into the hives.
Bees are so fascinating. I've already covered a number of facts in another blog about bees, but in addition...
If you want to reposition your hives, you need to move them at least 5km from where they were, and then back to the spot you want them to be set up in as a 'reset'. If you don't take them that far away, they get too confused and will continue to return to where they thought the hive was. 5km is enough for a reset :)
The super on the right holds 10 frames, and is enough to produce 40kg of honey.
James and his partner are raw foodists, so began growing fruit trees for food, and then began beekeeping to help pollinate their trees.
Some of their fruit trees are scattered around, and in other areas, they're in orderly rows. They find rows a lot easier to manage in terms of fertilising and weeding, and the space they leave between the rows is wide enough for a ute to drive down, making it easier for care and harvest.
They grow yellow sapote (known as boiled egg fruit), white sapote (pictured above), bananas, avocadoes, plantains, guavas, paw paw, panama berries, jackfruit, dragon fruit, cassava, bananas, turmeric, a huge range of vegies, miniature cucumbers (pic below) these are so cool, and can be a bit weed-like when they grow so need to be monitored.
Here's one of their fruiting avocado trees:
They get no frost so the trees they're able to grow are far more diverse than many are able to grow around here. They have quite a number of unusual fruit trees.
A highlight was the panama berries.. unbelievably sweet tasting little red fruit that taste like a strawberry mixed with fig with a hint of caramel. They taste a bit like a lolly! I googled to find out a bit more about them and they're fast growing, fruiting in the first 6 months, and producing fruit all year! YEAH!
I'm putting one on my wishlist and found they're available from Daley's Fruit in Kyogle.
He's got quite a few jackfruit trees. Jackfruit are quite amazing. The wood on a mature jackfruit can be used for outdoor use as it doesn't really rot like most woods. Jackfruits can grow to the same size as a Moreton Bay Fig, and produce prolific amounts of fruit that is mega high in protein.
James explained to us how many paw paw plants require a male plant to fertilise the female plants in close proximity. The female plants have fruit forming on the trunk. The male plants are identified by long stemmed flowers that protrude from the trunk. Apparently yellow paw paw do really well in this area.
Their banana circle was mildly struck with disease, or mould, possibly due to such a wet season and not enough ventilation due to too many plants in close proximity. They're fruiting nonetheless, and there's plenty of healthy looking leaves amongst the blackened ones. They use chicken wire mesh to cover the bananas to keep parrots out, as the parrots just tear through the blue bags normally used on bananas.
Dragon fruit were a fascinating discovery.. They grow on cactus looking plants that i've never seen before. I don't have a photo of the plants at James' but here is a googled image of one of these pretty interesting looking plants.
James grows his on what looks like fencing posts. The dragonfruit will usually grow up the trunks of trees, and then fruit, so James has made the posts short so the plants starts fruiting when it reaches quite a low height. He also has wire creating trellises for them to grow their limbs over.
Apparently the flowers are spectacular, and often come out in the middle of the night, and only last a couple of days. They're also called moonflowers for this reason.
I've read some accounts about the plant not fruiting if they're not manually pollinated, especially as they flower at night. James mentioned that there are quite a lot of ants around the plants and he thinks they're pollinating the flowers.
After the flowers die off, the fruit grows..
They also have some pecan nut trees:
They have a deep litter space in their chicken run which is a few metres square. They put all the chicken feed on this space, and vegie scraps as well as grass and the chickens scratch it around and it turns into humus as they rotate it. Every now and then they cease putting fresh material on it and let it rot down a bit more before removing it and using it in the garden.
In the chicken area they also have worm farms which they put the chook and geese poo onto and collect the worm juice for fertilising plants.
James took us to the vegie gardens where he has loads of stuff growing for sale at the markets. He explained how he uses byodynamic method of using 500. It's an interesting concept which i haven't heard of before.
| "Preparation 500 The cornerstone of biodynamics is preparation 500. This is made by stuffing cow manure into cow horns, burying those horns over winter, then stirring a small amount of the fermented manure in rain water (Proctor recommends 25 grams of 500 in 13 litres of water for a one acre block) for an hour and spraying the resulting liquid in droplets on your vineyard soil. The details of the stirring are important: it has to be for an hour, using the reverse vortex method, where the water is stirred in one direction until a vortex forms in the bucket - and then, when the vortex reaches the bottom, the stirring direction is reversed, creating chaos in the liquid. Again, this works on many levels, depending on who you talk to: this is either a way of attracting cosmic influences into the liquid - or just a bloody good way of mixing stuff up. | |
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He has set the rows up in line with the contour of the hill allowing good drainage. All mulch comes from slashed grass from the property. He doesn't employ companion planting practices from what i could see, and he has rows of a single plant.
He doesn't use trays for seedlings, instead planting directly into the soil, beneath a layer of mulch that is heaped to help run off the rain.
To plant the seeds, he has a wooden plank which he impresses upon the earth to make a narrow valley. He then places the seeds along and covers it over using the plank.
He thins the plants out in other rows after they emerge through the mulch.
His fencing surrounding the gardens run out along the ground about half a metre and then he covers them with newspaper and sawdust to prevent bandicoots etc getting in.
He has really strong fence poles holding the chicken wiring and also runs parallel wire above it to grow passionfruit.
It was in inspiring and fascinating tour.. and i'm so keen to learn more!
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