Winter Blues More News

I am hoping that winter is almost over and Spring is here. The peach trees in the various different orchards have been pruned, fertilized . I think I have to spread a bit of lime around them as well to sweeten the soil. A friend told me that to make them sweeter in taste I should place some around them . I know they are sweet but a bit more sugar never hurts.

This past Sunday we fertilized the pears, white peaches,nectarines and a few plums. That is hard work to shovel composted cow manure around the trees. We also set up an extention to our Boysenberry Patch as we had tons of baby berry bushes in a school but they were not getting the care they needed to graduate into our Boysenberry University so I decided to send them to TAFE. In the USA they call that Junior College. We ran new posts and wire to hold them all up in the future and this coming weekend we will transplant them all. We have Loganberries, Thornless boysenberries and plain thorny Boysenberries.

I think our row of boysens will be well over 200 metres (600feet) long. On a hot morning that is a long way to pick a row of berries. I always admire others who sell berries for the intensive labor that it takes to harvest them. Nevermind eating them. I promised myself not to make jam from them anymore. Boysenberries are from the blackberry family. The old canes have to be cut off at the ground, and the new canes have to be tied up on trellis wire. Fruit is only born on one year old canes. It is a lot of hand labor, and the canes are thorny. Hopefully time spent on tender loving care now, will result in a bountiful crop of sweet delicious berries really soon.

Two days this week was spent pruning and fertilizing the boysenberries. At times that can be hard. We have had spring like showers where it rains hard for a while , stops and starts all over again. Hopefully three more days of intensive work will have them ready for summer.

Today we will plant some sweet corn in trays to get a small headstart on the corn season.
about 500 should be enough. As soon as our new seeding planter arrives we can plant out an acre or so of the sweetcorn. Our plan is to plant about 500-600 a week. That way the staggering effect will give us enough sweetcorn for the summer sales we plan on having.

Well back to work, seeya real soon.

Farmer John