Two seasons after their discovery the raspberry canes were doing well. We had put them into beds, pre-dug to half a metre and then heavily composted, and transplanted their offspring canes to make maybe 200 plants in neat rows. They liked the copious compost and water from their drippers judging from the almost 2 metre height they achieved on their wire trellis. We were picking around 200 kg of fruit. Even after visitors had eaten their fill there were plenty of berries left over for jam. Maybe we could include jam in our business plan to augment the sheep and chestnuts.
The chestnuts were hopeless they were so frost sensitive. Everybody said that since chestnuts grow in very cold places in Europe, they could obviously handle our place. This was very true while they were dormant and leafless during winter, but once leaf and fruit buds started to swell in spring, anything colder than -2°C was a disaster. The buds browned, dried and died and had to be replaced by new buds for the leafing and fruiting process to begin again. This took around 1 month thereby reducing an already short season and resulted in half-filled unsaleable nuts at the end. Expanding leaves were also sensitive to frost. The expanding bits just dried up making very untidy-looking trees.
As we discovered, we could have frosts even in the middle of summer, indicating that without considerable global warming on our place, chestnuts could not be relied upon. Our 100 trees that had the potential to realise tens of thousands of dollars weren’t worth $100. On the bright side, at 800 metres above sea level, we were likely to be safe from any rise in sea level and we could climb the trees to get away from lions.
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