Autumn Harvest

Back when there were six gates between Esdale and the Wee Jasper Road to Yass, when going to town meant harnessing up a horse and buggy, fruit trees in the garden must have been precious things.

When my parents first arrived at Esdale in 1980, the garden had a whole orchard with apples, pears, nectarines, peaches, apricots, mulberries, walnuts, almonds, cherries, figs and 3 types of plums. Many had been planted in the 1950s and were already old. Only a handful still survive.

So I have planted several new apple trees, mulberries, peach and pear trees. Some have struggled (like the black nectarine which I’ve finally decided is just intended to be ornamental). Some have been attacked by “cherry slugs”, particularly the pears.

All of them are watched closely by our local cockatoos who will raid them as soon as anything appears ripe. We lost all the apricots from our big tree to a bad frost and to the birds this year. But finally our young tree produced a few, although the grasshoppers had chewed on them. Luckily our neighbours Andrew and Leonie had a good crop that they kindly shared with us, so I have replenished my supplies of apricot jam and frozen stewed apricots. Golden joy.

I finally researched what would be effective against the cherry slugs after trying several remedies that were not effective. Picking off and squashing the individual larvae was disgusting and disheartening. Tossing wood ash all over the leaves to supposedly dry them out was completely ineffective, and I had to have a shower to get all the ash off myself. The larvae proliferated in the wet years after the drought broke in 2020. We suddenly went from good pear crops to nothing.

What does work is a bacterial BT spray which is a lot less toxic to the world in general than other pesticides, which make the fruit inedible for a certain number of seasons. I finally got hold of it last winter and used it at the right time of year (the spring), and the result has been hundreds of pears for the first time in three years.

We also remembered to net the trees against the cockatoos, using our poly pipe frames to hold the nets.

Craig keeps trying to give pears away, but I’ve been hoarding them. I filled up the fridge vegetable drawer with pears that I hope will last another month or so in the cool storage.

Now we’ve added peaches, but not from our garden, which produced only a few pieces of fruit and those with not much flavour. The feral peach trees down by the creek which I’d given up checking on because in the wet years they had no flavour at all, our neighbours noticed and netted. It turned out they taste fantastic this year, so the drier and hotter summer must have suited them well.

We also got lots of basil from our wicking beds, seeded by Craig and Maya as a team. The plants didn’t keep the pests from attacking our tomatoes but they did make a big lot of pesto. We used sunflower seeds instead of pine-nuts because I’m allergic to tree nuts and it was delicious. I didn’t realise it needed to be cold stored, though, and we had some leakage and explosions before I figured out what was going it. It smelled great, however. Not like when the dog food cans exploded….

The apples on my two trees chewed by the grasshoppers are small and still aren’t ripe, but we’re hopeful we will get some soon. Craig keeps trying them and getting his teeth stuck.