It’s dry as a chip in the garden: less than 20% the average amount of July rainfall in Sydney and bushfires have already starting in the north of NSW, months ahead of the official fire season. Warm too – a record 24 days of 18 degrees C and above. It’s been 2.7 degrees C above the historical average for July. Climate change – it’s here, suckers.
But on the bright side, gorgeous blooms on the Tropic Snow peach, and plenty of bees. Touch wood, the varroa mite hasn’t arrived in Australia (yet) and our honeybees seem to be doing better than the rest of the world. I’m thinking about getting a hive or two, either of native stingless bees (though you can’t collect their honey here in Sydney) or just your everyday honeybees. So far I haven’t had any flowers from my kiwifruit vines (notoriously hard to pollinate), but you have to plan ahead.
In the mean time… welcome, visiting bees! Please help yourselves to our beautiful if precipitate peach-blossom.
The first peach blossom of spring winter: TropicSnow, a low chill variety. It has produced Cezanne-worthy fruits from its second year here – but so far I haven’t beaten the critters to them.
This year! This year! Mesh exclusion bags! Fruit fly traps! Pheromones! Chooks given the run of the pepino groundcover – dig, dig my sharp clawed friends! – on the condition that they utterly exterminate all fruit fly larvae. I’m toying with installing a band of slippery plastic (or inedible metal?) around the base of the tree to at least give the possums and the rats a bit of a challenge (or some core body exercise?). Tiger poo?? Whatever it takes!
Peaches apparently only live for a few years, and I simply refuse to have the damn thing die before I wrap my laughing-gear around some luscious sun-warmed home-grown fruit.
