Do you have a fruit tree or two (or many)?
We know a lot of “friends of HOFC” are also living the country lifestyle, with fruit trees, veggie gardens, chooks, and compost piles.
That means our new course will be right up your alley! We’re happy to announce that we’re running the Learn.Plan.Succeed: Create your fruit tree action plan course in a couple of weeks (starting Feb 11).
Who’s running the course?
We’re glad you asked, because we know our multi-enterprise coop can be a bit confusing.
This course is being run by Katie and Hugh as part of their Grow Great Fruit business. But it’s also intimately related to The Orchard Keepers (OKs) on-farm orchard business.
These days, the OKs runs as a community model. A group of volunteers (called Fruit Crew) look after the orchard two days a week under the cheerful guidance of the Fruit Crew Leaders and Katie and Hugh.
Fruit Crew picks and sells the fruit at the Castlemaine Farmers Market (and other occasional markets). Plus, they can take up to 5kg of fruit home for each half-day shift that they work.
It’s a fun and effective model that is evolving a bit more each year. This is the first season we’ve employed Fruit Crew Leaders, for example.
We’re learning all the time—and we want to pass it on!
Fruit Crew is the 3rd version of us mentoring inexperienced people to run the orchard. (Before Fruit Crew the orchard was leased out twice, and we offered mentorship as part of the lease arrangement each time.)
It’s fair to say we’ve learned a lot, every year, about how to support people to successfully grow fruit when they don’t have 20+ years of experience behind them.
One thing stands out, and that’s planning!
Planning leads to success
It sounds simple, but it’s really true. Our experience has shown us time and again that having a plan in place makes the difference between success and failure.
Of course, then you have to follow the plan😅!
Bird netting is definitely on the Fruit Crew plan, but when we didn’t quite get it all done in time this year, here’s what happened. We came to net the Mariposa blood plums and found that half of them were already on the ground with a birdpeck in them.
These mini-disasters are great learning experiences for everyone on the crew, about what can happen when you don’t get a job done in a timely fashion.
They also help us and the Fruit Crew Leaders refine our leadership to prioritise the right things at the right times.
Luckily, the other 90% of the nets went on as planned, so we’ve still got a great crop to pick this year!
Knowing what to do—and when to do it
To create a plan, you also have to know what jobs you’re supposed to be doing, right?
In the Learn.Plan.Succeed course we’ll be going through the list of ALL the jobs you need to do for your fruit trees each year. We won’t be talking a lot about “how” to do each job (because we have other resources and courses for that) but we’ll start each topic with the principles to help you understand why you do each job at a particular time of year.
At the end of the course, you’ll have a complete calendar of jobs for the year ahead. Here are the topics we’ll be covering:
- Monitoring your fruit trees
- Irrigation – when to water
- Animals and fruit trees
- Thinning
- Pests and diseases
- Nutrition
- Planting and looking after young trees
- Grafting
- Pruning
- Harvesting
- Weed control
- Managing risk
It’s a big list! We’ve split the course over three live sessions because if we tried to do it all at once everyone’s heads would explode. 🤯
We also provide a Workbook for you to create your personalised action plan.
The whole course is online, so you can sign up from anywhere in Australia (or the world)! We’ll also be recording the sessions, so even if you can’t make it to the live sessions (see the dates and times here), it’s worth signing up and watching the recordings.
Hope we see you there!
Jedda loves Fruit Crew as much as they love her