The orchard

What is actually planted

Eleven fruit species share this ground. They went in over several seasons rather than all at once, and they are not laid out in blocks. A row may carry one species for twenty metres and then change, because the planting followed what was available and what survived its first summer, not a drawing made in advance.

Kinnow is the one most people arrive knowing. It comes ready in January — which is also when the orchard begins to flower, so the same four months hold one species being picked and most of the others opening. If you want to understand this farm in a single visit, come in that window and walk the rows slowly.

One tree, and then eleven species

This land was bought with a single tree standing on it. More than five thousand grow on the five acres now, and the orchard is only one part of that — the rest is food forest, the beds and the boundary planting.

Eleven species in one orchard was a decision. A block of one species can fail in a single season to a single thing. A mixed one does not. It costs us, though. Eleven species means eleven separate moments of attention and no single harvest week to organise labour around. It also means more to keep track of than we have managed, which is how the tree count came to be wrong.

The count that went down

For years the orchard was described by the number of trees that had gone into the ground. Then somebody walked the rows and counted what was standing, and the number came down.

A planting figure tells you what went in. A standing figure tells you what is alive, and the two drift apart every season through losses nobody wrote down. We report the standing figure. It is the smaller number.

Water, and the nine zones

Nine irrigation zones run off a single borewell. In practice that is a weekly argument. One well, nine valves, and somebody deciding which part of five acres gets water. In a dry spring the orchard and the field crops want it at the same time, and the orchard does not always win.

What goes back into the ground

Twenty-four vermicompost beds take what the farm grows and return it to the ground it came from. Prunings, bedding, the parts of a crop nobody eats. The beds are not much to look at, which is probably why we have plenty of pictures of fruit and none of a bed opened up.

The bees, and the gate they put on the calendar

The apiary collapsed in summer heat. Ten colonies are alive now across about fifty boxes. The drawn comb standing in the empty ones is worth more than the boxes. Comb costs a colony a season of work to build, and a colony moving into drawn comb starts a season ahead of one building from nothing.

Eight or nine of the eleven species flower in the same four-month window, so anything sprayed then is not a small decision. We put a gate on it. Our own software will not clear a spray date it cannot square with the apiary record. It does not warn and then proceed. It refuses, and somebody has to clear it by hand or not at all.