Visit Orielton Cliff 2025

FGG members were excited to get the 2025-26 garden visits underway, with Cliff kindly offering up his garden at Orielton as the season opener.

Having moved to the property only a few years prior, Cliff has made significant progress setting up his food garden on the site of an old sheep farm and tackling some of the location’s challenges. The soil is a black cracking clay over bluestone, which is full of nutrients when moist, but low rainfall in the area can make it difficult to work with the soil for extended periods.

Wind is probably the most prominent gardening issue in the area, and apart from planting around 300 trees around the property boundary, Cliff has installed some interesting windbreaks to protect his fruit trees.

Firstly, his large, netted structure has been designed for wind, rather than pest protection. It has a shade-cloth-type material around the exterior, with netting (*) only used on the roof. Both products were purchased from a company named Netpro ( https://www.netprocanopies.com/ ) .

* when choosing netting, consider the size of the holes – you want a minimum of 7mm holes to let the bees in, but too much larger and cabbage white butterflies can get through as well.

Within the netted structure, a few individual trees have also been given some added wind protection.

Outside the netting, the loquat trees are thriving within these tall shelters, and the yuzu citrus has its own wind and frost protection cover.

Everyone was very interested to hear about Cliff’s fruit tree grafting. The low productivity apricot tree in the photo below was given a severe prune, and three different apricot varieties were added via more than 20 grafts (now rootstock!). The bark/cleft grafts have been wrapped in cloth tape then painted with a flexible wet area sealing paint (refer image below), that won’t crack and that ensures no air gets into the graft while it is bonding with the rootstock.

Cliff has scores of different fruit trees around the property, including pome fruits, stone fruits, persimmon, pomegranate and kiwi fruit, with plans to add further net structures to house fig trees.

 
He has employed a unique method for encouraging the fruit trees to develop a deep root system – boxing the area to raise them up slightly, then letting the grass grow up around them. Because the grass dominates the upper soil layer, it forces the tree to send it’s roots deeper to find a more consistent source of water and nutrients.

Cliff has built a series of veggie beds from recycled materials, bringing in some soil and then building up with thick layers of mulch and manure.

The veggies were lush and productive, with broad beans, snow peas, broccoli, (enormous) carrots and a range of greens.

 
Many of the beds had inter-plantings of flowers for pollination, and comfrey is harvested and fermented in a rubbish bin to create a “tea” for fertilising the garden.

There were many tasty contributions for morning tea, with the produce table offering a range of opportunities including berry fruit cuttings, lemons, tree chillis and parsnip seeds.

All In all, it was a delightful morning to kick off the season, take in some new gardening ideas, catch up with old FGG friends, and welcome new members to the group.