So I ended up not getting the horse and organic vegetable farm in Provence… but we can dream, can’t we? After gallivanting through the European summer for two months, catching up with precious family, attending weddings, sightseeing and investigating agritourism in-between, the harsh reality of the cold Victorian winter hit us in the face as we stepped of the plane in Melbourne at 5:35am last Tuesday morning. Needless to say, after such a long absence, there was a lot to observe and catch up on.

Early blossoms

Great to see some early blossoms on some nuts, plums and on an early apricot too!

Winter growth

The winter vegetables and the winter cover crops made a poor showing so far. We have to start preparing the beds for spring sowing, but there has hardly been any growth to work into the ground!

Meanwhile the clover and weeds have been going ballistic! The forest vegetable beds at Dreamland have grown so dense, you can’t even see where to start. With all this flowering going on, it must be good for the bees – they’re all over all the yellow flowers.

On a positive side, the paths we planted at Dreamland just before we left are looking good. I had to give them a good mowing to be able to distinguish the paths between the beds.

Cold start

Of course with such a long period of no action, my composting process has gone cold. It’s not hard to imagine with all the winter cold, frost and rain. Hopefully all the grass and clover clippings contain enough nitrogen to kick-start the process again. There surely is enough compost fodder as we start clearing the vegetable beds for spring planting.

Frost

We’ve had a little bit of frost damage. The tomato tree looks much for the worse.

One of the Burdekin plums’ frost cover has blown off – so it looks a bit worse for wear too. In the meanwhile I have replaced the frost cover – just as well, as we’ve had 3 bouts of frost since we’ve returned.

As an experiment I didn’t cover one of the baby tagasaste trees. I must say even though it hasn’t grown much, it is not showing any frost damage. (Mmm I need some practice with close-up photos!)

Citrus

The fledgling citrus trees, on the other hand, seem to going quite well. The mandarins who took a beating with last year’s frost are doing nicely and are bearing the sweetest mandarins!

But now I don’t know what to do with the young citrus trees that have frost cover over them. Many of them are flowering, but this week, for instance, we had two really cold days with heavy frost forecasted. There’s no way I can open them up to that kind of torture at the end of winter. Oh well, my philosophy is that they are actually too young and still too weak to bear anyway. So I’ll rather let them survive the winter and then grow stronger for next year.

Getting down

A serious list of projects are waiting to get tackled; no rest for the wicked! No doubt we’ll be reporting on those. As someone once said – the great thing about winter is that it makes you feel alive!