climate change and them apples

An interesting read about backyard fruit by Australian gardener Jackie French: how not to grow backyard fruit. Basically, climate change is wrecking the way that gardens seasonally work – as proven by her garden in 2019. Still productive, just not as much as usual.

Mind you, she lives south of me, in the Araluen Valley which is southern NSW and inland a little, where the soil is LEGENDARY fertile and the winters are much sharper than up here in Sydney. The summers are also less humid, and possibly not as hot. So she does a lot more pears and apples than we can do up here, where a more mediterranean climate calls for citrus, and sub-tropicals.

Weirdly, the last season worked beautifully for all my early-flowering stone fruit in Sydney. If we get the same rains in late September and early October, then my nectarines and peaches crop should be pretty spectacular, even though I trimmed all those trees down quite significantly this autumn.

I definitely need to manure the three apples and the dual plum – this weekend, I think. Maybe the cherries, too? I think last season’s dearth of crop was due to wrong weather conditions rather than a lack of nutrients but I’m not entirely sure about that. Hm. Definitely potassium for the cherries and plum, then manure on top – although debating whether to run it through the chook pen first.

1. scrape back woodchips (maybe chip them more finely into a bucket)
2. apply potassium
3. apply manures
4. reapply woodchips

I wonder if the south-west corner of the property would do okay for the apple tree I’ll get in September. Ground is probably rock hard there, but maybe if I wet it down, then manured it, then mulched it, then woodchipped it... It probably still wouldn’t be ready by the time the apple turned up (mid september) but... The main problem would be whether the apple would then be too sheltered by the giant Illawarra Flame. It’ll be a Pink Lady with a Braeburn graft – the Braeburn is the one that we really want, and the issue of the Braeburn’s fruitfulness is primarily to do with chill hours...

I’m wondering if the ridge of green lawn that marched along the run of the sewerage pipe is because the old (probably clay) pipe held some residual moisture in the midst of a drought season that kept that line of grass verdant when the grasses around it faded. Also wondering just how difficult it would be to rig a greywater pipe from the kitchen sink out to the fruit tree garden. Because there’s so much rinsing-off water that just goes down the drain to the sewers and it could be used just as well to water the fruit trees through the dry spells...

Still need to speak with a plumber about the runoff from the roof. And possibly a roofer about the gutters and eaves.