I bought citrus food while shopping yesterday and I'm just waiting for rain to be predicted and then I'll sprinkle it around the outer edges of the foliage of my citrus trees and water it in.

I obtained a fertilizer with a wetting agent included in the product as it can get hot and dry, here in the northern Goulburn Valley where I live. That is ideal conditions to grow citrus as lone as they have irrigation.

Home growers of fruit have a responsibility to care for them as insect pests allowed to flourish in home gardens might infect a commercial crop and devastate a commercial industry.

Citrus gall wasp is one example. A single wasp can lay up to 100 eggs on a tree. The gall wasp infests in new growth, typically at the start of spring, in all citrus varieties. Five years ago, it was something we hadn't heard of, now on the increase. It is in the river land of South Australia and as yet it has not reached  Tasmania. Like fruit fly, unless it is controlled it will spread throughout the country. 

Remove branches with citrus gall wasp eggs, and then wrap infected branches in plastic bags and leave them the sun to kill the eggs.

The commercial crops are looking good and this year it doesn't
look as if the fruit will be dug in due to imports, at last, we are exporting again.

A fabulous change for our orange growers is happening at the moment with a  huge surge in Australian orange exports to China, which is welcome relief for citrus growers.

A massive revamping blogging weekend. Remaking twenty websites. Painting with images, HTML and words. Loving it.

Watching wheat ripen and roses is my other 'difficult' activity. Life is sweet.

I hope things will be as sweat for the farmers. Wheat currently is selling doe around $305. per tone.

Last year the farmer planted Canola, this year he went half and half wheat and canola which was wise considering there is a global glut in canola that has dropped the price of canola this year.

Global glut hits canola (The Land)

Here is an old newspaper report from the Argus Newspaper of 1929 telling of how the farmers stocked up after April rains then drought came to the districts and the farmers were paying drovers to take the sheep into the roads, along the long paddock to keep them alive because the paddocks had been grazed out.

Living along side farmland gives em a wonderful experience of witnessing the cycles of nature without enduring the financial ups and downs of the seasons.