Forest – Gallifrey Forest Farm

Citrus Variety Planning

2022/11/28 Danielle 0

Disappointingly, it turns out that I cannot in fact get access to the new red-fleshed Mandared mandarin cultivar being managed by ANFIC. Early discussions indicated that they would send me budwood for an evaluation planting, but.. well, the person who said that no longer works for them, and apparently failed to mention that (a) there are fruit royalties on the variety as well as tree royalties (it’s a PBR variety), and (b) it’s being managed through a massive marketing group for nationwide sales and export, and (c) therefore they’re really not interested in smaller plantings. Like I said: disappointing. It […]

Planting and planning

2022/08/15 Danielle 0

It’s been a busy few months. I know that this time of year always feels very hopeful, and by the middle of summer the heatwaves of desperation have set in, trying to keep everything alive.. but I do think it is getting better each year. Easier, maybe. I mean, we have actual winter pasture this year. Not much, yet, but the clover is properly established, and we’ve put out a pasture mix this time around so we should have ryegrass and more clover by spring. We’ve also got almost all of the trees in that are in the plan. Four […]

Rainy Days

2022/07/18 Danielle 0

It is raining right now. Sheets of chilly, clean water, falling from the sky, and it’s hard to watch it and also hold in my brain that this has been a very dry winter, statistically speaking. Obviously, that’s only in WA. The east coast has been inundated, again, and apparently we’re (the Bureau of Meteorology is) predicting another La Niña summer coming up. Our third in a row, which is, I am told, unprecedented in recorded history. La Niña years are wetter than average, for context; the east coast probably has more flooding to look forward to, and WA will […]

Belatedly

2022/05/19 Danielle 0

Well, it’s been a ..I want to say year, but in fact closer to four years since I updated this. In the meantime, we actually moved out and into town for 2 years because roadworks on the main road up here were making our commute to our on-premises, in-town day jobs miserable. Then there was Covid-19, and a few changes of job situation, and the roadworks finished (finally!), so we moved back in. The farm is still going, in spite of 2 years of not living on the property, and slowly, slowly, our plans are coming together. Not helped by […]

Fruit Trees from Seed

2018/04/16 Danielle 0

The received wisdom of gardeners and horticulturalists everywhere (I’m generalising, go with it for now) is that it’s pointless to grow fruit trees from seed because they don’t come true to type. (True to type means that the fruit of the daughter plant will be the same, or very nearly the same, as the fruit of the mother plant.) There are exceptions – mangos and mot citrus produce what are called polyembryonic seeds, which means that there are multiple embryos in each seed, and only one is the result of sexual recombination – the others are asexually produced, and will […]