There is an insect circus in our sink.
My wife is in the kitchen preparing our homegrown apricots for drying. But there are grubs, lots of them, dropping from the fruit into the sink, then leaping like acrobats from one bowl to the other and back again.
“I’m not eating another one,” my wife says.
Our 2024 crop, spoiled. And not just the apricots. It wasn’t like this before global warming arrived in our back yard.
For the past two seasons, as rising temperatures lead to Australia’s agricultural pests creeping south, fruit fly has struck our apricot tree. Nearby is a venerable jonathan apple tree – a once common variety, now rarely seen – planted in the 1940s. When we moved here 44 years ago it bore huge crops of large, unblemished fruit. But for at least a decade the apples have been burnt by rising UV levels and infected with codling moth. I’ve thrown everything at these sneaky beasts short of toxic chemicals: attractant traps, trunk barriers and all the usual natural repellents like garlic, chilli, citronella, Neem. No luck. And that’s just the insects.
This bayside Melbourne suburb used to be a leafier place. There was more green to go around for us and wildlife. Now, as high-density living is encouraged and concrete gains ground, our yard has become an inviting destination for anything with a bird’s eye view. We cherish these wild creatures; not so much their appetite for our produce.
It’s our second apricot tree. The first died from exhaustion after ring-tail possums spent two seasons consuming its sweet spring leaves. Seven years on, fence spikes and a plastic owl seems to have worked. That’s the possums dealt with.
To combat fruit fly, this season I sprayed our fruit trees with a lime-sulphur mix used in ancient Rome and recommended by an elderly Italian neighbour. Thankfully, our 2025 apricot crop was about 80% grub-free. But the apples are a lost cause.
Every Christmas, though late this summer after a severe Melbourne winter, we’re visited by a clan of dazzling rainbow lorikeets who clearly have our place on their schedule. I imagine that raucous mob touring the country wherever the ripening season takes them, in winter quaffing mangoes and macadamias up north. They appear each festive season to gleefully shred our grub-infested apples then offer the pulp to their youngsters, who plead for their supper with a shrill whine that’s hard to ignore, in a tone uncannily like a hungry human infant.
While standing impotently in the back yard aiming an imaginary bazooka at my haughty tormentors, I’ve often pondered the ethics of my species’ conflict with wildlife. The birds peer down at me, a large mammal rooted to the ground, apparently aware that they are as free as, well, birds. Sure, their species was here long before mine, so I’m really camping in their forest. But I also planted many of the trees whose fruit they’re eating. I don’t want to turn the back yard into a cage, as some people do, and nets are useless against those robust beaks. Festooning our trees with plastic bags only hot-houses the fruit so it rots on the branches.
So this harvest, for the first time, I tried something new. Rather than discourage the birds, I welcomed the family of yellow-bellied wattle birds that has colonised our place, attracted to the nectar-producing flora we’ve planted.
Wattle birds are aggressively territorial and even growl at me if I climb a ladder and dare to pick my share of “their” apricots. Even the parrots are discouraged by their presence. This avian attitude works in my favour, for the adult wattle birds will perch with their chicks in our fruit trees and forcefully see off the neighbourhood’s masked bandits: a gang of Indian mynahs. I know which species I’d rather have around. The mynah’s hostile warning screech declares me a trespasser in my own back yard. By contrast, the wattle birds now seem to know I’m not a threat and happily nibble apricots while we breakfast below them.
The mynahs strip our Persian black mulberry, now over 30 years old, and are just the day shift. As more evidence of climate change, a pair of fruit bats made our hood their home about five years ago and, after dark, score what the birds leave. Despite these depredations I usually manage to retrieve about two kilos of fruit per season with selective netting. That still means the bats’ nocturnal emissions turn our car into a vampire-purple abstract installation, and in mulberry season I get odd looks on the way to work. Is it all worth it?
Tend to an orchard and before long you’ll be moving to the beat of trees: an unhurried pace measured by the visits of wild things, weather episodes and the seasons of a turning world. Your year is punctuated by chores: the autumn pruning of unsound branches; sculpting to accessible size and shape; fertiliser in spring and autumn; spring remedies of chilli, garlic and citronella for caterpillars; white oil for aphids, fungus and scale; amputation the only cure for gall wasp.
Then the imperatives of harvest: up the ladder early to beat the birds; test each fruit for ripeness, just as they do. Ideally, before they do. Then processing and preserving. And forget about holidays at harvest time.
So why not concrete the place and head to the supermarket?
Because you’d rather be up in a tree surrounded by back yard bounty, gently moving with the breeze, choosing fruit aglow in the morning light and seeing that same glow on the cheeks of your children as you wipe sticky juice from their grins. Because you’d rather bring a feast to the kitchen made of sunlight, air, soil and water, with a little toil from you, on your small patch of ground – bright citrus in the pit of winter; apricots fresh, bottled and sun-dried; a year’s supply of chilli, kimchi, olives and pesto. And did I mention mulberry ice-cream? That’s why.
