Kingsford  Grove Report 

June 2008

June was a fairly cold month for the Mallee as the maximum temperature did not get above 19 degrees celcius and there were seven light frosts during the month, none of which were bad enough to do any damage to the trees. We had a total of 18.6mm of rain for the month which is well below the June average for this area, so we are certainly hoping for some decent rains in July.

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So far for 2008 we have only had 83.6mm of rain which is well below average as well.

Cropping between the rows with rye has now been finished and it is all up and looking good. The foliar spraying of the trees with a fungicide is continuing on days when the weather is good, the cold mornings with heavy dew and windy days have been holding this up a reasonable amount, if we were to get 4 or 5 good days we would get it completed. We have also started weed spraying but again the weather is making this a very slow job.

In the meantime we are checking sprinklers for a flushing irrigation which after harvest is always a very slow and tedious job and we are also slashing prunings. The pruners are currently going through removing any broken branches from harvesting and also removing some of the lower limbs on the Frantoio trees which were too low for the shaker (below 80cm). The large majority of the Frantoio trees have been pruned up high enough but approximately 4 or 5 trees in each row had a branch that gave the shaker operators a problem.

The sheep that have been in and out of the grove over the past year have now been replaced with a new mob of merino lambs.


Submitted by
Ken Schutz
Manager
Kingsford Grove