We moved into our home in 1992. The garden has about two dozen very old pome fruit trees. Apples, pears and quinces, some planted over 100 years ago. The pear trees are huge – about 12 metres high with trunk diameters of about 1 metre. The trees were riddled with Codling Moth, with over 90% of fruit having grubs inside.

In the second year we decided to start using pheromone ties. The Codling Moth damage dropped to around 25%, and after two seasons the level of damage stabilized around 10%, so we were quite pleased. Pheromone ties must be placed near the tops of the trees for best effect, but doing this in the pears was out of the question, so we just lived with a bit of damage.

We should start by saying that we have never studied marketing, and have no particular expertise in this field.

It seems to us that “modern marketing theory” is the art of trying to convince someone to buy something they don’t really need or want. We have gone right back to first principles, and have developed the following approach to sell our fruit. Here is an outline of what we do and why we do it, in the hope that others may be encouraged “to have a go” producing fruit for their local community. To set the scene: we live on a quiet backroad 40 kilometres from Mount Gambier, the second largest city in South Australia, which has a population of only 30,000. Adelaide, with about 1.1 million people, is 4 hours away. We don’t have many locals interested in purchasing fruit simply because it is organic.