a big black horse and a cherry tree

After watching Gardening Australia's segment on cherries - a few lessons!

Cherry trees: stress them a little.
- too healthy, into leaves and shoots.

If there's too many branches, then they'll put all their energy into leaves and shoots

- soil type doesn't matter
spring: pelletised chicken manure
winter: again
mulch it through winter

But they need to be mulched through the winter, and fed early spring (probably July for us) and winter (I'd guess April, just before mulching.)

- chill factor - 700hours 8C or lower

That's about 1 month below 8C. It can definitely work in the colder parts of Sydney - southern plains, western Sydney, and up in the northern hills districts where we spend most of June and July between 5-10C at nights. I've had a pretty good cherry crop in Sydney, but I'm attributing the fact that it wasn't 'really good' to my ignorance on how to manage a crop.

Pruning: I think this is probably where the rubber hits the road for me.

For seedlings
December: cut back to 50mm
- take the vigorous ones out
- too vigorous too healthy

The trees on the program each had long skinny branches that had multiple fruits on them. I've been trimming my long branches back to shorter stubs because that's how to do it with larger stone fruit and with apples. Looks like it was a mistake - too many opportunities for the energy to go into leaves, not enough energy to go into fruit. So later this summer, I'll be chopping back the tree - take out the really big branches quite heavily, maybe stump one or two of the medium branches and see if we get the long, thin growths around it. Can't hurt, right?

To Do: January 2020

Welp, I dropped that ball pretty handily over the Parra'dowee - the warm and the wet – didn't I?.

And boy, was it warm and wet!

I lost a lot of my stone fruit to mould and possums - it was too damp for them to survive without rotting or going fungal/moulding. Oh, I have a decent crop, but not half as many as in previous years. Basically, the trees are all going to need a hard pruning this year to get them down to a manageable size, and to

We're now heading into the Burran season of Sydney – the hot and dry. You wouldn't guess it from today's weather and how it's looking through January – low troughs that will run through most of January with a clear patch in the later part of the month.

With the Sydney Edible Garden Trail in two-months-three-weeks (two months if I get drawn in the 'Costa visits a garden' competition), there are some tasks that seriously need to be done.

1. filling beds with soil
- small vegepod
- backyard wicking bed
- bathtub bed

2. planting out beds
- small vegepod: lettuces/root vegies
- backyard wicking bed: root vegies
- bathtub bed: lettuces
- plum-stone bed

3. pruning trees
- plum
- stone
- apple
- apricot
- cherry
- donut peach
- two-stone
- dual peach

4. mulching garden paths

5. talking to the neighbours about getting scraps for the chooks, worms, and composts, as well as picking up grass clippings

6. dig out the right hand compost and sieve

The pruning would be best done first - get the trees trimmed down, and then deal with the beds underneath.

Digging out the compost would provide the soil for the new beds, and can happen at the same time as the pruning.

Planting the beds has to happen after the beds are refilled, and should happen before the end of January.

Mulching the garden paths is pretty optional - the paths are not ideal, but right now I think they could last through to winter, then be added to the chook tractor as it goes around the garden.

All this is made rather more difficult by the likelihood of a lockdown in Sydney after a Christmas/New Year outbreak, and three weekends that are already booked up. Additional to which, I've been fighting a virus (not COVID) for the last couple of months and it's causing me to run out of steam a lot faster than I used to.

Anyway, this is me in my new gardening apron, preparing to make a video about Real Chooken Keeping In Suburbia.

Keep an eye out for that later this year!