Lush Lychees, Paul and Krystal Caton have best season at Yaamba farm yet

This year’s lychee season has started off really strong for Paul and Krystal Caton, producing well with good colour and high quantities.

This year’s lychees season is shaping up to be the best yet for CQ growers Paul and Krystal Caton.

The couple have a farm located 30 minutes outside of Rockhampton, at Yaamba, where they grow seven varieties of the sweet Chinese fruit.

The season starts in December and it kicked off with a bang as the fruit coloured strong and produced well with a high quantity yield.

Harvest of the trees began on December 5 and on January 11, pickers reached the highest quantity of fruit picked for a season on the farm.

There is still around two more weeks of picking to go, meaning this year’s harvest will well and truly surpass any of the past five seasons.

The Catons hire staff at harvest time to help pick the fruit, but it has been difficult this year to find people.

“We don’t have any backpackers, we are lucky we have return staff from other jobs in Rockhampton that they have holidays from at this time of the year,” Ms Caton said.

“But given our larger crop size, we needed a lot more workers and that was tricky to get.”

The crews work in two teams with the picking team starting at 5am, picking the fruit until around 9am.

“Any time after 9am, it starts to heat up too much and changes the structure of the fruit,” Ms Caton said.

The team then head into the shed and destalk the fruit, taking it off the stem so there is singular lychees.

The lychees are then chilled to five degrees temperature and packed out.

A team will then grade the fruit based on different specifications including colour, size and marking.

“Every new staff member has a training session before they start,” Ms Caton said.

Sadly not all of the pickings have been up to scratch.

Some of the Kwai Mai Pink variety trees have fallen victim to an insect that has marked the skin.

“The flesh of the lychee is perfect, edible quality, it’s just the markings on the skin and they are too large for our specs that meet our fresh fruit supply,” Ms Caton said.

The best option for this third grade fruit is to peel, pit and freeze it – as it is still more than edible.

However, the peeling and pitting all needs to be done manually and is quite time consuming.

The Catons are looking at grants to put in a processing plant in the future for this reason.

“It would be lovely to see us put in some kind of processing plant at the farm to account for the years where this happens,” Ms Caton said.

“There is no processing plant in Australia currently.

“It might help make lychees available all year around.”

The Catons have also recently expanded their operation, having bought 1200 hectares of land across the road.

They have already planted some lychee trees but they will be a while off picking yet.

It will be three years before they have some fruit on them and five to seven years before they produce a commercial quantity.

“It is a long term plan, but it is happening,” Ms Caton said.

“Hence my want for establishing a processing plant for lychee at our farm because we will have a larger amount of trees coming on in the future.”

The farm gates are open from 9am to 2pm until the season ends, cash only sales.

Follow Lush Lychees on Facebook for updates.