I stumbled across an old photo today. Judging by the size of the child on my back it was taken seven and a half years ago when the sling was the only place that Martha would sleep. As Bruce commented when he saw this empty paddock where my crazy rambling garden is now, it’s so easy to forget the long journey you have been on, and what has been done. Isn’t it just.
Those sleepers came from the Warragul railway yards back when they were replacing the wooden ones with concrete on the Gippsland line, and they were so heavy that the old Fergy could only manage one at a time. We used them to make four huge, magnificent raised beds that tumbled down the hill. I loved those beds. But sadly so did the white ants, and a few years ago I pulled them out and dug the gardens back into the paddock soil.
This photo is before the fruit trees, before the raspberries, before the huge Huonville crabapple that now dominates the top of the garden. Before the Russian garlic went wild, the potatoes went feral and the fennel naturalised in the chook yard. Before raising the calves, before milking a cow, before the pigs, before school bus runs.
And before the peaches.
Yesterday I spent the morning on a ladder in the rain, slowly picking leaf curl infected leaves, one by one, from the peach trees and dropping them into an empty pollard bag. These trees look old, established, part of the garden architecture, but they were only planted seven years ago. They are wonderful old commercial varieties, now elbowed aside by trees that produce firmer fleshed and thicker skinned fruit, so much more suited to rougher handling and long haul transport. Loring, Fragar, Golden Queen; clingstones or at least semi so, so evocatively described by Jackie French in A Year in the Valley and actually why I planted them.
The Anzac, Elberta and Blackburn Elberta were planted earlier, probably around the time this photo was taken. I planted them in the old calving yard, before I realised that years of compaction and a heavy clay layer would ultimately defeat not only a deep ripping implement but the needy roots of fruit trees. These are the classic all rounders that you’ll find in every farm orchard, backyards too, and if you only had room for one peach tree, you’d want to make it one of these. During the dry years they did brilliantly, even if their roots were cramped, and we would pick boxes of fruit that would sit on the hearth and fill the kitchen with their sweet spicy scent before bottling them in rows and rows of No. 36 Fowlers jars.
Then the winters turned wet, the springs and autumns too, and with wet feet and poor drainage these lovely productive trees dropped their leaves one damp May and never made it back.
In the meantime the more recently planted Fragar, Loring and Golden Queen in the grey loam at the edge of the garden were thriving and I took special care pruning them and spraying them with copper, their fruit now all the more precious.
But somewhere along the way came one wet spring too many, and despite all our efforts that curse of peach lovers, leaf curl, has now really taken a hold. Last year we got no fruit at all but we managed to keep the trees alive by meticulously picking off every misshapen and infected leaf (feed sacks full of them), fertilising and, in autumn and winter, spraying Bordeaux mixture (copper sulphate and lime suspended in water) to try and cleanse the trees of the virus.
This season, somewhat disconcertingly, they have set loads of fruit but the leaf curl is worse than ever; a desperate bid to reproduce before dying, or a miraculous recovery? Fingers crossed for the latter, I’m up here on the ladder again, picking the leaves off, thinning the fruit (reluctantly) and hoping for a few dry days.
From my vantage point I can see all around the garden, through the tops of the trees, across the roof of the chookshed. And there, growing right up through the vicious thorns of the rampant Mermaid rose, is a peach tree! Healthy as anything, and with fruit too, a self set from a spat out seed, growing quietly and virus free in the corner.
Seven years of peaches.
It’s no time at all, seven years; it’s so good to be reminded of that.
Seven years ago I sat with my baby in a bare paddock. Now there is a garden crammed with food and trees that look old and established and a kid who makes cubbies there. Peaches have been planted, tended, fruited and died, and more planted in their place. Fruit has been imagined, anticipated, eaten and preserved, seeds spat out and new trees germinated.
I think we should all get some peach trees in. Meet you back here in seven years…we’ll compare notes about the sweetest and the juiciest, who you had to outwit to score the first ripe fruit of the season, the virus and how we battled it, the day the Fragars rendered us speechless with pleasure, the bottles of Golden Queens we opened in the dead of winter to have with porridge and remind us of summer.
I’m looking forward to that. I really am.