Expert tips on sustainable orchard growing from 'Pete the Permie'

Pete and wife Sylvia have worked their 6-hectare property for over 20 years, with about 3 ½ hectares under intensive cultivation. Their garden is a working system, part of their everyday lives. Pete is a full-time ‘permie’.
They live, breathe, and eat the place - propagating and selling fruit trees, teaching permaculture and life skills like cider, cheese and wine making, mentoring volunteers and apprentices and rearing rare breed animal species. As Pete says, ‘We have so many interests, it is hard to just focus on one!’
The garden is over 125 years old, a former dairy farm on a gently sloping block near Olinda, about an hour East of Melbourne. ‘We looked at over 150 properties, this one has beautiful volcanic soil - water & aspect. It fell through our fingers once but finally we managed to get it’. When they purchased the property in the early 90’s there were only 3 fruiting plants. Now they have over 1000!
Pete is known as an apple guy, with 400 plus different apple varieties planted in alphabetical order, grown for fresh fruit, preserving, cider and even timber. ‘The Blenheim orange is probably my favourite, a great apple but also really hard timber! I have a mortar and pestle made from it.'
Pete and Sylvia make the most of everything in the garden, eating, preserving, and fermenting their spoils and sharing the knowledge of growing them with those who come here. ‘We do it because this is how we live. The place is a drop-in centre on Fridays, when students come back and talk, make connections and grow their own paths. When they succeed we succeed’.
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