Last weekend Anna and I drove all the way to Waratah enduring rain, snow and mud to try and find “Wara1” – as recorded in my GPS – a single pepperberry tree that I marked in 2017. Needless to say it is a special bush. It stands at only 2.5m high and yielded 20kg of berries in 2017! That sort of yield is unusually high. It would make a great addition to our future pepperberry orchard! As it turned out, however, it was hard to find.
Initially I thought I could locate it by memory alone. Nope. It could have been any of a dozen or so. Not perturbed I switched on my GPS but was disappointed to find it accurate to only +/- 100m – useless!
So a couple of hours and 10mm of rain later we managed to find it. I had constructed a small cairn under the tree which, 3 years later, was covered by moss and dirt. We cut off a small branch for propagation.
We spent a little time hanging out in Waratah. Camping out was fun albeit bloody freezing – it even snowed! We checked out some of the best pepper stands in Waratah – which are probably the best wild stands in Tasmania (and the world actually!)
We camped out at Laughing Jack lagoon en route home – proving that it is possible (but not easy) to light a fire when everything is wet – lifesaver! And then we headed home to the serious job of taking cuttings for propagation.
There you are – 1500 new cuttings to look after! Our orchard will one day help us to be less reliant on wild harvest – read on if you’re interested!
