Edna Sabile is determined to grow bigger apples by experimenting with varieties and grafting. Photo: Luis Penida.
Inspired by her father’s love of Asian vegetables, Edna Sabile has turned a one-acre block of land northeast of Marulan into a market garden and orchard bursting with produce.
So passionate is Edna about growing fresh food she is up and dressed at 5:30 am waiting for the sun to rise so she can get among her fruit trees, vegetable plots, chooks and ducks.
She began her little farm 10 years ago to grow Asian vegetables for her father, Librado, who was amazed his daughter could raise such a variety of produce without previous experience.
“To my excitement I ended up growing 54 kinds of Asian vegetables and people now come to the farm to buy,” she said. In the seasons which followed, drought and floods slowed down the vegetables, but her orchard continues to expand. Sadly, Librado died in 2018.
She learned everything about fruit trees from watching YouTube clips. She has persevered ever since and gone to great lengths to produce saleable fruit. Her daughter Leahna helped establish the farm, which they call Red Hills Organic.
She was netting the trees to protect fruit from marauding birds, until a heavy dump of snow in September 2019 broke the big nets. “Now I net the trees individually to protect them from the birds and I bag individual fruit to protect them from fruit flies,” she said.
“It took me two months to bag the apples,” Edna said. “When you include plums and other fruit, I probably bag close to 2000 pieces.”
The key ingredient to her large, crisp fruit is poultry manure – lots of it, applied over winter.
Coming off the trees by the bucketload, Fuji and golden delicious apples from Red Hills Organic, near Marulan. Photo: Edna Sabile.
About 200 Muscovy ducks and 100 assorted Isa brown, Australorp, Sussex, and Rhode Island chooks fertilise the fruit trees and orchard and customers snap up their fresh eggs. The poultry occupy about 30 per cent of her time.
Edna grows for her family, the Filipino community and for roadside sales from the back of a truck, while continuing to plant and experiment with her trees.
“The well-established older trees don’t need watering, but I water the newer ones twice a week, depending on the weather,” she said.
Red Hills Fuji apples are due to ripen this month and Edna will also be picking her persimmon this month. Golden delicious apples and pears ripen from January to February and pink ladies are ready about March.
In spring she will be planting to meet demand for her green tomatoes.
“The orchard is a big bonus because now I put a lot of time into improving my crops each year, to be able to sell organic, pesticide-free fruit which we’ve been doing for the last 10 years,” she said.
Her goal is to produce bigger, sweeter apples for the future, by thinning the fruit by 50 to 60 per cent. Thinning involves removing the smaller fruit from the tree to improve the size, quality and health of the remaining crop.
“I love the quietness, the peace that I have away from motorists, away from neighbours,” she said.
What began as a hobby became more profitable, though not enough to earn a living, when she began selling fruit trees. She will continue grafting trees and building this side of her little enterprise.
She estimates she has about 200 new trees in the ground now. The trees are grown from seed and then grafted. From grafting she has Fuji, golden delicious and Granny Smith together on one tree, and five varieties on another tree, the three previously mentioned plus pink lady and white skin apples.
The self-taught orchardist is also trying her hand at air layering – cutting a branch, putting moisture holding material around it to encourage roots and using it on her apple, plum, nectarine, peach and cherry trees to increase plant production.
“The community can actually buy plants from me, identical to what I have at the orchard,” she said.
Keep up with Red Hills Organic or get in contact via their Facebook page.
