Rainfall

With only one heavy shower on the 16th August, the water situation is
starting to be serious. We have now started irrigating our trees -
mainly the Mangosteens alongside the creek which is an old gravel bed
and the first place which shows stress on the property. The Salaks
are looking very tatty and the fronds are dying back,with just the
skeletons of the leaves showing.

Bud Grafting

We have started to do some bud grafting with the seedling Rambutans.
About six months ago we cut the male rambutans trees back to a stump
and have left them to grow suckers. Now with the suckers about finger
thickness we are cutting out patches in the bark and inserting new
patches which contain a bud from a known variety obtained from Colin
and Dawn Gray, our next door neighbours. It looks like we are going
to be about 50% successful in the patches we have tried.

What's flowering and fruiting?

Still no flowers on the Mangosteens which means there will be no
fruit for November, and we are holding our breath to see if there
will be flowers in the next month which will ensure a crop for March.
We have one small Durian after a prolific flowering from one tree -
lots of small fruit formed but have all dropped off. The one
remaining is about golfball size, so we wait and hope. Our star apple
crop has been prolific in the last few weeks - the first real crop we
have had - with three trees out of the six that we have producing
fruit. The Jaboticabas have produced two crops in the last month -
and the small trees in the pineapple patch have even produced a
couple of fruit.