When Topi and Lucia contacted us to come and spend some time at the farm, I couldn't believe it when they said they were professional tree planters wanting a (working) holiday, well, planting trees! In their day-to-day world of contract tree planting, they will each plant up to 3500 trees per day!!! These guys were work-hardened and super fit, and it was a pleasure to spend a few weeks with them working on various projects around the farm.
Here we are putting in a small 60m run of shelter-belt species at 1.5m x 1.5m spacing along our shortest southern boundary. Species include Tea-Tree Oil (Melaluca Alternifolia), Cape Wattle (Albizia Lophantha), Weeping Bottle Brush (Callistemon Viminalis) and Pigeon Pea (a short term Nitrogen fixer). These will provide bee forage throughout the year for our honey and native bees, and also connect into a continuous sheltering corridor for bird species to nest in whilst performing vital pest control within the orchard.
There's limited space between the boundary and existing Macadamia orchard, and with power lines overhead, establishing a deep, tall and graded windbreak was going to be difficult. The spacing is relatively close, and includes some existing fruit trees (Citrus, chestnut et.al) so will require thinning and some pruning management in the years to come.
