2015-2016 President's Report

The 2015 – 16 financial year has been a very successful one for the Society. Although we finished the year with a deficit of just over $2700, we purchased a ride-on mower and trailer, for over $3300. Without the large capital expenditure, and a grant of $1000 from Esso, for which we thank them, and Jill Stevens for organising, we would have had a deficit of under $500, which is very satisfactory considering the work we are doing. Profits from our sales and tastings go back into the orchard and pay for collecting and maintaining the varieties we have.

Of course, we only look at the finances in this way, to ensure that we have the money to pay for our operations. Of paramount importance is conserving varieties and encouraging people to plant varieties after making an informed choice. To this end we ran a series of apple tastings in autumn, and we see the benefits of this when people come to our grafting days and ask for varieties they have tasted earlier in the year. We also aim to give our best possible advice on varieties to grow, and I wish to acknowledge the volunteers who have information about varieties that they are happy to share with others. Building our knowledge base is an important part of our work.

We approached CERES nursery with the idea of selling our trees, and they agreed. We supplied an initial order of 50, with 8 more just recently. This is a direction we are interested in pursuing, as our trees are then sold all year round. We plan to approach a small number of other nurseries to become involved. The requirements of CERES made us improve our presentation, and it also provided the impetus to run a dedicated grafting day, just grafting for our own purposes, and we have continued that into this year.

We have worked with Werribee Park Heritage Orchard, where we attended grafting and budding days, swapped scion, and run the first of what we hope is many heritage fruit tastings. We have supplied scion to The Briars in Mount Martha to assist in establishing a heritage orchard, and again ran a grafting day.

Our plans for the current financial year include grafting and conserving the plums, quinces, apricots and medlars we have recently collected from 2 private collectors, to hopefully begin a stone-fruit collection here at Petty's and expand the one at The Briars. We have given the excess scion to Werribee so they can expand their collection.

Again I would like to thank all our volunteers for giving up their time to run our operations. Hopefully it is an enjoyable and rewarding experience, and we look forward to the new year (already started) when we can expand and deepen our work.

Thank you for coming to our meeting, and for being part of our organisation.

~ Cecilia Egan, President HFS.