As this year is fast drawing to a close, I'd like to wish you all a Cherry Christmas and a productive, profitable 2023.
As we prepare to celebrate this Christmas season with our family and friends, many of us are planning out our incredibly colourful fruit bowl displays, seeking unusual salad combinations to serve with Christmas ham, and googling vegetarian and vegan recipes for our guests.
Whatever you're looking for Queensland horticulture has it all, with many fresh produce agribusinesses now in full swing, harvesting top-quality produce ready for our Christmas tables, picnics and car trips. From Mareeba to Stanthorpe and everywhere in between, growers and workers are making sure we have fabulous Christmas produce to share with our nearest and dearest.
Summer holidays quickly bring to mind the sound of cricket playing on the tv or radio, the smell of sweet, ripe mangoes, the job of cutting watermelons for days out, enjoying stone fruit daily, the colours of berries and passionfruit in the almighty pavlova and the taste and visual displays of bunches of cherries. And that is just the fruit!
Christmas time means all types of vegetables get the royal treatment. Whether they are fried in butter, mixed with herbs, helped along with an addition of a condiment of cut fresh and ready to eat, there is an abundance of Queensland vegetables ready to go.
And let's not forget our fabulous Queensland nut industry. What is Christmas without an assortment of chocolate covered macadamias, pecan brittle and beer peanuts? Anyone else hungry?
For all its glitz and glamour, it's not lost on us that for many growers this time of year offers no let-up of work, and many will work harder than at any other time of year, missing out on meeting up with family and friends. If this applies to you - we see you!
We also see those growers who are crossing their fingers and toes that they are not again impacted by weather, those growers who have lost too much this year due to weather or other impacts, and those growers struggling to gain a price that in any way covers their costs of production.
