Selling fruit

I have a ridiculous amount to learn about gardening and cannot even identify all of the fruit trees as it is almost winter and a lot of them are pretty bare, but so far this is what we know we have:

- Figs
- Granny Smith Apples
- Walnuts
- Hazelnuts
- Grapefruit
- Several types of Lemons
- Cumquats
- Mandarins
- Oranges
- Feijoas
- Kiwifruit
- Passionfruit (the regular Purple and an interesting variety with a soft orange skin and deep red pulp around the pips inside that Wiki thinks is Passiflora caerulea)

There are many others and I suspect we may also have:

- Peaches
- Nectarines
- Apricots
- Another variety of Apple
- Cherries
- Plums

I have called around trying to find someone who knowledgeable about fruit trees and is willing to provide a consultation, to identify what we have, to see what needs work (pruning/removal/grafting) and to teach me how to do all this. 

So far I have managed to line up a local tree expert, Leigh Stone, who is coming next week to see what we can do in the orchard.

We have been here for 3 weeks and have made a bit of progress. The first week I asked the local organic shop if they would be interested in purchasing our fruit for sale and to my delight they said yes, so we dropped off Granny Smith Apples, Grapefruit, Oranges, Lemons and Cumquats. About 2kg of each, which we had carefully picked, individually washed and packed. This earned us about $50 which I took to Heronswood and used to purchase MycoGold and Rockdust to prep the vegetable beds, a book to teach me about gardening, a moon planting calendar and a few freebie plants and seeds because I spent so much, including rhubarb, Algerian oaks and an old-fashioned rose. Needless to say I spent slightly more than our profits, but all in a good cause :)

I was wondering whether the shop would need/want any more of our fruit when I called on Friday to see how it had sold and happily, they wanted everything again and this time about 3 kg of each!

On Saturday, we were showing some friends who had come over for lunch the orchard and there were plenty of apples on the Granny Smith tree, but when I came to pick the fruit on Sunday the tree was almost bare! There were 4 apples left and one that looked a bit chewed. We were seriously perplexed, we couldn't imagine any person could have done this, not without a ladder at any rate. Everyone had told us that the birds would get the fruit if it wasn't netted and lo and behold, my husband found chewed bits of apple on the roof of the tank shed near the tree. And then we remembered how many king parrots we had seen that morning....

So they got a meal and we got a lesson...NET the fruit trees!

They had also had a good nibble at the unripe kiwifruit and feijoas, so after we dropped off our second lot of beautiful fruit to the local organic/health food shop, (oranges, lemons, grapefruit, cumquats and passionfruit), we headed to the local nursery and bought bird netting with the proceeds. 

We had a hilarious time trying to get a 4x4 net and two 4x5 nets over the kiwi fruit vine and feijoa tree. The kiwifruit vine is about 3 metres tall, about the same wide and incredibly easy to get nets tangled in, I had to give it a bit of a prune before we could even attempt to net it. Then we only managed it by loosely tying a corner of the net each to large poles to lift it up and over the plants, all the while my daughter was running amok with the secateurs, fun and games. 

The feijoa tree was easier but the net wasn't nearly big enough, so I had to peg it around the bottom as best I could and hope that this deters the birds.

We will have to wait and see...