Whilst not expecting a glut of fruit this year with the trees all being so new in the ground, it is still exciting to see we have 1 almond growing and 3 small apples from the ballerina apple trees.
Archive for October
Here comes the Mulch
The cheapest quote I could get for mulch for our orchard was $850!! Way beyond our budget. So how happy was I to come back from the school holidays to find 2 large piles of mulch waiting for us courtesy of Scott our fantabulous Caretaker. He had some of the school trees trimmed over the hols and got it mulched for us and so it cost not a penny! So the last couple of weeks we have slowly been spreading it around our fruit trees. Some folks helped out after school, the Enviro action group have put some muscle in and we had a working bee last sunday to finish it off. It is looking fantastic and thank you to all who have loaded wheelbarrows and buckets of endless mulch. It has been a big job.
We have had a green crop in the circles around the trees, which puts nitrogen into the soil which the trees like. This has now done it’s work and has been cleared from the circles to make way for the next stage which is planting orchard friendly wildflowers around each tree. The flowers will attract lots of beneficial insects who will hopefully eat up any destructive ones that lurk about. I hope to get the seed sown this week, so it won’t be long before we see some bright colour around our orchard.
At our last working bee we also planted 2 more tamarillo trees, 3 grape vines and 4 passion fruit vines, all from Incredible Edibles.
Take a look at some of our latest photos:
