A few surprises

In my last post I was talking about my cardamon and how much I love it.  I had heard, probably from the wonderful Jerry Coleby Williams, that we are too far south here in Brissie for the cardamon to ever flower and give us seeds.  But guess what??

I couldn't believe it this morning when I was giving the hedge a bit of water.  It was tucked away and the cardamon is now head height so it would have been easy to miss.  Well, I may not get seeds still, but I'm pretty happy just to see the flower.

Slow growing trees

I had some friends over yesterday that I knew when I was in Sydney.  They had been looking at my posts on facebook and when they were in Brisbane, wanted to come out and see what I've been up to.  As we walked around the property, we chatted about what I was trying to do and how much our food bill had gone down already.  When we got to the food forest, more for the mulberries than for anything else, my friend said "so you're here for the long haul." She was right.  The food that will be available to us in five years will be very different to what we've got now.  In the short term, its mostly the veggie patch that is feeding us, with a top up from the two citrus trees and the two mango trees that were already here when we arrived two and a half years ago.  Since then, we've put in well over a hundred trees and shrubs, none of which (except the mulberries) have given us anything to eat....yet.  But in five years, things will be completely different. We'll be able to add avocados, pecan nuts, macadamia nuts, peaches, pears, apricots, nectarine, plums, jack fruit, chocolate pudding fruit, jaboticaba, apples, chestnuts, figs and loads more citrus. But you do have to be patient.  I've also been patiently working on layering my food forest with other edible shrubs and ground covers which are faster to yield, as well as herbs and flowering plants to attract the bees.  So here are a few pics to show how things are progressing

The nursery

For my birthday last month, my sister-in-law and mother-in-law gave me a box of goodies from Green Harvest (the perfect present for me).  In the box where many packets of warm season seeds and sub-tropical seeds, so I ramped up the nursery and added a few more seeds that I'd saved from last season and got to it.  Three or four weeks later, its looking fabulous

Spring in the patch

I was made redundant a few weeks ago and so that has meant more time in the garden, which I'm really enjoying.  And now that we are in the dry season, its a good thing too, as the patch needs plenty of water.  Our soil is on the clay side of things and when it dries out, its not pretty.  But if you keep the water up to it, its beautiful.  So I've just come back up to the house after doing just that.  And here's how it looks