It is difficult to decide which season is the most beautiful in the orange orchard. In spring it is a fairyland of blossoms and bees. In summer, hard green balls cluster on the branches, and glossy leaves spread a wide umbrella of shade over the grass.
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Autumn fattens the fruit and paints its pebbled surface in a green, yellow, and orange gradient and during the crystal days of winter, the fruit is soft and ready to pick. Baskets are piled high and hauled home.
The orchard, perched on a hill near my family home, did not grow in the magical way its appearance suggests. A glance at the surrounding paddocks of sparse, spiky grass reveals that this lush plot of land has been laboured on and nurtured through years of drought and discouragement.
Before my family began work on this paddock, it was a place to avoid. To the visitor it was just plain ugly. To the bushwalker it was brown and scratchy – the sort of countryside one emerges from covered in burrs and sticky grass seeds. To the farmer it was spent and over cropped—a worthless paddock.
The only person who viewed the place differently was our elderly neighbour who for many years had skilfully raised and tended trees.
With a vision that one day this patch of land would be a place of great beauty, he said it would be an orange orchard and trees would grow lush and large, yielding harvest after harvest of golden fruit.
We responded enthusiastically to his idea, and once the plans were set, neighbours young and old came over to help with the planting, but it was not long before drought set in.
The trees suffered terribly, with scorching dry winds sapping away the water.
First they turned yellow, then shrivelled, then died. Those that survived barely grew. Scale and other harmful insects attacked without respite. Though we spent long and tedious hours watering, weeding, and fertilizing, the trees failed to respond.
However, hope was not far off. Through further research, several surprising facts were unearthed.
The trees had been planted incorrectly.
We had drilled the holes into the rocky clay soil and the surfaces were sealed and hard, preventing the tiny rootlets from spreading and allowing the tree to grow. The roots coiled themselves in endless spirals in their cylindrical prisons.
A much more effective planting method would have been ‘ripping’, where a tractor pulling a heavy hook rips a ditch through the ground before leaving the soil for a number of months to aerate.
When the trees are planted the soil is loose and the roots can spread out reaching the water table.
Thrilled by this discovery, we began ripping lines and transplanting the trees into them, adding two new rows at the lower end of the orchard.
Sure enough, the trees thrived.
The insect invasion, though a battle at first, was eventually overcome as well when we discovered ‘white oil’, destroying the scale and other harmful insects without creating any secondary problems.
Above these improvements, what effected the greatest change in the end was hard work.
The work was never easy. Caring for an orchard meant getting out there in all seasons – lugging water, weeding, and mulching each tree with armloads of hay and just when we needed it most, it rained.
The rain didn’t let up all spring and by December 2010 the drought was declared officially over.
Life sprang up each tree, showing itself in a head of new growth. The harvest that year outweighed any before. Finally, after years of toil and discouragement, the orchard took off.
Now, any visitor to the orange orchard will see rows of healthy, green-topped trees. They are still small, but are growing and though the orange harvest grows every year, every harvest is considered a miracle.
I know without a doubt that these oranges are far sweeter than any others. It isn’t just a particular variety that makes the difference. They are sweeter because we paid the price.