This is the month to gather a few dozen free fruit trees, for yourself, or for friend's back gardens, the local school, or anywhere you think a fruit tree might find a good home.
''Free'' in this case means ''won't cost money''. It will cost time - but not very much of it. All you need to do is find seeds, plant seeds in pots, tend them, find a spot for them, plant ... and keep tending and harvesting.
When someone says ''all you need to do'' it usually means they are about to give you several years' worth of instructions. But in this case it's only a few minutes at any one time, even if it does take years to get a harvest.
There is a lovely myth that fruit trees won't grow true to type from seeds. Admittedly you only get baby trees when a mummy tree and a daddy tree get together with a bit of hanky panky from birds, bees, wasps, wind and other pollinators, and the backyard gardener has no way of knowing what the fruit from a tree that's been pollinated by a very different tree may be like. But today's fruit trees have probably been pollinated by other extremely delicious fruit trees.
The chances are that your ''new'' tree will be similar, if not quite identical, to its parents. If it isn't, it will still be good - and you may even find you have accidentally grown a fruit that's even better than its parents. The first crop of a seedling tree is always exciting.
Commercial growers can't have the fun of experimenting: they need a uniform product, one that supermarkets and other customers will recognise. Backyard gardeners only need a luscious product, one that is so good you will remember to feed and water and pick the fruit before the fruit flies or possums find it.
And this is the month to get planting. Much of the fruit we eat, like apples, peaches, nectarines, pears, almonds and cherries, need chilling before the seeds germinate. Your lunchtime apple will have been well and truly chilled by now. Other fruit, like citrus or avocados or lychees, don't need chilling but do tend to germinate better in spring.
The late Ned Wisbey once told me how he planted the first commercial peaches in the Araluen valley. He was ''up in town'' when he saw some affluent-looking tourists throw peach stones in the bin. He planted the seeds and a few decades later he and his sons had tens of thousands of peach trees, though by then they were rigorously bred for taste and red blushed uniformity.
I've grown several hundred seedling trees, from at least a hundred kinds of fruit, including bush tucker where I've discovered withered fruit in my jacket years after I gathered it. All the seedling trees I've grown have fruited, and only two differed markedly from the parents.
So grab a milk carton, soft drink bottle or any other container that will hold potting mix or home-made compost or even good garden soil. Place holes for drainage at the bottom. Place a seed in each container and place them in a spot that gets sunlight but doesn't bake. Water, wait, and hope for germination in a few weeks or months, then plant the tree when it's big enough to signal its existence to someone with a lawn mower: "I am a young tree, not a weed. Do not mow me down.'
Two cautions here: dwarf trees stay small because they have been grafted onto not very vigorous stock. A seed from a one-metre dwarf peach may grow three metres high. Most fruit trees now are grafted onto ''semi dwarf'' stock, as modern backyards are too small for a pear tree that grows five metres high and almost as wide. Your seedling trees may need to be tamed by regular winter pruning if you want them to stay small and neat.
The other caution is that most apples and pears will need a pollinator, and so will cherries and almonds unless they are a self-fertile variety. On the other hand I know four pear trees at least half a kilometre from any other pear tree, and they all bear fruit, and I have yet to see a feral apple tree growing on the side of the road that wasn't laden with fruit come autumn - and extremely good fruit, too.
If in doubt, just plant lots. You can dig out the ones you don't want in years to come, or hire an expert grafter to give your tree a few branches of the correct varieties to ensure pollination.
But plant. Eat an apple now, and plant its seed. Squeeze a lemon or lime into your salad dressing, then plant their seeds. But don't bother planting the olive seed from your lunchtime salad. It's probably been far too processed to germinate, though on the other hand, I've never tried planting olives from the deli. Maybe it's time to see just how much an olive seed can tolerate.
But gather your seeds now. Plant lots. Even if you never get round to planting the young trees yourself, you'll find them ridiculously easy to give away. Free fruit trees ... who could resist?
This week I am:
- Becoming ridiculously optimistic about planting the summer veg and flowers just because we have had 40mm of rain/snow after about six months of almost no rain at all. So I am planting parsley and even thinking, just possibly, about some spring flowers, though I might wait till we get at least one more shower of rain before I go that far...
- Gazing at the packet of cosmos seeds given to me at the Gold Coast Organic Growers meeting last week and wondering a. if the cosmos will grow if we have a hot dry summer and b. Will the cosmos become a weed if we have a summer of ''scattered showers about the ranges'' and that scattering includes here?
- Trying to pick each day's parsley shoots before Possum X gets to them.
- Celebrating the survival of the Bishop's Hat perennial capsicum not just through last winter's frosts, but the drought as well.
- Hoping that tomorrow, or the next day, the rain will coax the first asparagus up through the mulch. And that we will get more rain, and more asparagus, for months to come...
