A Life Goal: To Be Fully Self Sufficient (3.5 year Homestead Tour)

G'day, welcome to our homestead here in northeastern Australia. We're trying to do as much as possible to be self-sufficient on a relatively small piece of land. We've got a lot of different varieties of fruit trees, we've got our own vegetables, herb garden, a lot of different varieties of animals from water buffalo to cows to ducks to chickens to goats and we've also got a farm style cafe here. You can actually come and visit where we are here in this beautiful part of Australia. Make sure you're checking out the link in the description where to find it. If you do like seeing updates on how to be more self-sufficient on the land, subscribe to this channel to help share in this journey and I want to give you a tour of where we're at coming into summer. This is Georgina, she's about, what would you be Georgina? Maybe six weeks, five or six weeks old. She's the first miniature goat, first bubba that's been born here at the cafe. This time of the year we've got a lot of hens that are laying eggs and a few have eventuated into little chickens. Come and check this out. We've got about eight gold lace wind dots that have been born. Mum's pretty protective but you'll see them just under here in the goat pen. There's about eight chicks that have been born. Yeah everywhere we turn around there's more hens, more baby ducks, more chicks. Must be optimal conditions this time of the year for for raising chickens. Are you right there? Are you right? 8.30am both Saturday and Sunday, every weekend we've got animal feeding so you can come and check out all the ducks and the chickens and the goats, meet baby Georgina. Quite often you'll see the cows and the buffaloes as well. 8.30 sharp every weekend come and feed the animals. We've got quite a few baby mangosteens the queen of fruits. Here in the nursery we've got some big approach grafted durians. We've got a few Malaysian and Thai varieties which will go in the ground in the next month when it starts raining a little bit more. King ferns, other tropical native fruits, a couple of big jack fruits, we've got a breadfruit, poulissans, we've got some rambutan marcots. If you are looking for any of this stock we have limited supply but we have a farmer's market this second Saturday of every month so message the Pocket Cafe in Elarus, jump onto the Instagram, or just follow that if you want details on when those events are on because quite often we'll sell stock from the nursery at that farmer's market. There's some pretty good stuff in here. Very excited to start planting soon. So this first row was planted three and a half years ago. If you've been watching from the first couple of videos we've done here you'll notice there's quite significant change in the growth. This has taken a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of maintaining. There's quite a lot of pests that come and eat the growth tips when they're young. If we get too much rain the roots are at risk of rotting and phytophthora. But this is a seedling durian. Typically it's going to take sort of six to ten years to get fruit. Six if you're very lucky, ten more realistically. But this is three and a half and yeah I reckon a couple of more years and we may stress it to try and throw flowers out. But that's looking, that can't look any better. Like that's looking pretty good. We've got a grafted durian here. This may take four or five years to get fruit. This is a grafted gumpun which is a Thai variety. Thai variety. We were originally planting bananas and pawpaws, gingers, tumerics, chilies into cropping. But we're slowly taking out the bananas just because the root base takes a lot of the nutrients away from the durian. So we're now cutting these banana suckers out or digging them out and feeding them to the goats which they seem to love the diversity of food. This was originally a mangosteen row which we were finding though they were very hard to grow and they were dying quite readily. But these mangosteens are looking good, the few that we have in. They're all from seed. They're a Borneo variety. There's supposedly two, Thai and then Borneo. You have to keep them shaded until they're about this big and now they look after themselves. But the growth tips are very very soft, very delicate. They're getting smashed by everything, all the insects and bugs. Yeah another five years and we'll get some fruit. Behind me here is a row with jackfruit and champadak. This is a really big champadak that's just started to throw flowers at about three years old. It's getting smashed by one of the main pests we have called Rhyparida beetle. It's a little black insect and I'll show you here it's literally covered. They're falling all over me. They're falling all over me. That's what they look like. Oh and you can either spray insecticide on them and kill them. That's probably the most effective but you also kill a lot of the beneficial insects such as your praimantis and other beneficial wasps. So that's the sort of damage they do which on a bigger tree doesn't matter as much but on the smaller ones it can be the difference of your tree surviving or not. So I'm just crushing them up, killing them and this is one of the reasons why we've introduced having the Indian runner ducks in the orchard because if there's any low-lying ones they'll go through and eat them but they won't pick and eat a lot of the vegetative growth, a lot of the leaves. They'll mainly eat the insects and nibble at it with the beets but yeah it's hard to tell. Some trees just get smashed more than others by these insects. Over here though something very exciting to share with you. The first big crop of jackfruit you come under here there's you know that's still a really small tree but we've got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine and more coming fruit. Oh 10, 11 there's two other huge fruit. To be honest we probably should be thinning out some of the fruit like take that off, take that off but we're just going to give it a hell of a lot more fertilizer and see if they fill out an amount to anything but this is a really fantastic variety from mainland Malaysia. One of the main commercial varieties but it is a seedling so it means it may not be true to the mother. It could be a little bit better, could be a little bit worse, hopefully it's a little bit better and because it is a seedling and it's its own thing it's its own particular variety of jackfruit means we get to name it so stay tuned because when we pick it we'll eat it and if it's good we'll name it and if it's not good we'll chop it out and top graft it with something that is better but I've got a feeling it's going to be amazing. So this is the first fruiting on a champadak seedling. I'm pretty sure that it's a twisted or a leopard skin. I can't remember but it's a beautiful variety of champadak. This here is a female flower. The male flowers here end up molding and falling off. They generally come out of the tips that there will be a male flower. Still smell quite nice, very floral, very fragrant and out of the branches you'll get the fruit. We've got one, two, three, four female flowers which will end up being hopefully some pretty nice fruit. I feel really lucky, very fortunate that we've got some fruit setting on here because a lot of people wait seven, eight, nine, ten years to not get fruit on their champadak so we're doing something right. So this jackfruit behind me here is a cutting so you can propagate them from seedling, graft, marcot or a cutting. This one here was from cutting and it doesn't have a taproot which some would argue there's positives and negatives for but one of the main negatives we're finding is that it's just not as healthy of a tree. It looks a bit more scraggly, it's a bit lighter in color, there's a bit more like molds and funguses on the trunk but that's not what I want to tell you. A point of interest with this one is that this fruit that is set here has been stung at a very young age and it's made the fruit disformed so sort of tossing up whether we cut this fruit off and hope that they throw out more flowers and set more fruit elsewhere or whether we just leave it and hope it amounts to something but like that there it getting stung when it's young will mean that you know we don't get a fruit that's probably worth 50 to 80 dollars or potentially more so yeah we needed to just be a bit more on to when to either you know spray it or come and bag it when it's young to protect it but yeah if anyone's got any tips we are still working it out all right there's any jackfruit farmers out there jackfruit enthusiasts we're still learning so any input you got as you go through any of these videos yeah please let us know this is a small marcotted orange crunchy jackfruit gifted to us from daniel gunsberg thank you when you see this brother it was one of his favorite fruit that he ever had and it was a mixture between a two different commercial varieties of jackfruit an orange and a yellow crunchy and sweet jackfruit this one's probably quadrupled in size in the last two months the durians are looking absolutely fantastic this whole row is grafted durians some are doing significantly better than others it may be to do with the root stock it could just be a better root stock but they've all been treated pretty much the same from fish frames to chicken shit to mulch to lime to gypsum to like in all the different micro and nutrients a lot of different things and different foliar fertilizers on the leaves but yeah some are just doing a lot better than others this may be some of the most exciting news we've had since owning the property this three and a half year old grafted durian we think might be flowering it could be pushing little buds that turn into leaves but it could be throwing buds that turn into flowers if it does it's super rare super lucky very much an outlier leader of the pack time will tell it's very difficult to tell if you get a closer look here you'll see all of these little buds pushing out of the branches some of the lower branches and if they do end up throwing flowers it'll be some of the biggest best news we've ever encountered first durian first durian flowers we'll see time will tell stay tuned big news very big news this is one of two mangoes that we have planted here it's a thai variety nem dok mai pretty sure that's a thai variety it's a grafted one it was covered in flowers not one fruit ended up setting because rain and wind knocked them off very disappointed does anyone have any ways outside of just hoping for the best with the weather to combat that i'd love to know it should be covered in fruit but it's just not which is a shame because i don't want to have to go buy mangoes i'm going to show you now the veggie patch but i'm going to let my brother jack talk you through it because him and eva have been leading the charge with creating our veggie and herb patch okay so we've hatched lots of chickens and ducks this year we hatch over winter because you've got a higher success rate of getting hens over roosters and while they're young since we're incubating them we keep them in a pen otherwise snakes and everything are just going to try and eat them but we've been utilizing that pen and rotating it through the yard to fertilize trees and to clear spaces where we're going to put plants and garden beds so we originally had them here and we moved them around over this patch for about a month until they ate all the grass down to dirt fertilized it and then we've built hardwood garden beds around it these are old cattle posts that came out of a set of cattle yards so this timber is already 70 80 years old and still solid as then we've got a garden mix filled it and i overfill garden beds just because they are going to sink down and then i've covered it in hay and manure from the goat pen so when we clean out of the goat house i put it all on the veggie patch so this patch is actually for next winter which is you know eight months away when we're going to start planting but you want to prepare your beds and start burying fish in them and fertilizing them and just building all the soil nutrients so that when you go to plant it's going to be optimal and fantastic and ready to go so this is next year's garden bed ready as is this one i've done the same thing here but just put trellis up and this is what's going to grow our tomatoes our wing beans snake beans chocos but mainly tomatoes we love tomato behind me is our or was our winter garden bed it's sort of looking a bit sad now a lot of it has died off but i'll show you what we still do have so these are seedling tomatoes lots of different heirloom varieties i've just staked them up mainly tomatoes in this patch i've planted chilies all through it chilies are really good for just keeping insects out and we love lots of different varieties of chilies so this is all beautiful basil stuff's eating it at the moment but you sort of have to share anything that's good in the garden we've got nice celery we put this in a lot of our stocks and and soups also really nice this is a little zucchini and you can see the little baby zucchinis coming on right here again female and male flower planted some red pawpaws on the end here we've got some lemongrass in more vulnerable chilies i put in pots just because they drain a bit better when summer comes around we've got sri lankan banana chilies they're beautiful not too spicy we've just put in white chocos they're growing up here we've got one more tomato left of the season of our big green heirloom tomatoes we sell lots of heirloom seeds in the shop but i try all of them just to see what works in this climate before we sell them we've got lots of nasturtium flowers these also came from seeds from the shop these are like just nice and peppery they're good in salads we put them on our cakes for displays but they're an edible flower really nice as well this was mainly the herb patch so we had thyme oregano this is dill this is coriander but i'm letting it all go to seed now so these are all the flowers and then it'll go to seed the coriander seeds will actually be able to harvest and use as a spice but also we'll be saving these seeds for next year and every year you do that your seeds will climatize and evolve and adapt to this climate this weather this soil type so over time we'll build more disease resistant and stronger plants for our climate here so it's a long-term game but all the old europeans in australia have banked seeds for 40 50 years through family lines and found that you get longer seasons and better quality fruit so that's our goal here we're just in the veggie patch we heard these footsteps through the orchard and charlie's here with his chicks one of the rarest birds in the world they're only found in a certain little patch of northern australia and a couple of little spots in indonesia and the low-lying parts of papua new guinea but yeah this is charlie he's a male they raise the chicks it's incredibly special to have in your backyard the downside is they do eat all your fruit and anyone who thinks that they only eat fruit is wrong we've seen them eating roadkill on the road they come in and they try to eat the baby ducks and chickens and they also eat the whole indian runner eggs they're eating whole duck eggs let's go see if we can get a closer look charlie and his chicks are actually one of the best plant distributors they keep the rainforest going that there is cassery shit a couple of days but all of those seeds there will propagate and strike into what makes the rainforest here in this part of australia but all this is our fruit but that's all right it's a fair tax to pay to have one of the most special birds in the world in your front yard just bagging up a couple of they're from south america and we've got some baby ones here it's finally started to fruit heavily and instead of spraying it with pesticides we're throwing these little bags on so they don't get stung they'll end up being a beautiful sized fruit up to a couple of kilos this particular variety you can also make a tea out of the leaves that we find putting this mesh on enables it to breathe and protects the fruit go you good thing this tree here is an alarma tree which are not very commonly found here in australia it's not the perfect climate to grow it but they are cousins of say the custard apple or the soursop they're still in the anona family and that there is one of the flowers one of the first flowers it's actually got there's a couple of small ones here and i really would love them to set fruit please let me know in the comments if anyone knows how to pollinate these or how to best have the best success at getting fruit to set they taste like vanilla and raspberry i've only tried one once they're exceptional really hoping we get fruit off them got a few different varieties of pawpaws this is a yellow you pick them when you start seeing a little bit of yellow coloration come through the bottom of the nipple there we're eating these for breakfast most mornings and if you watch this garrick and family from valley view pawpaws thank you for the seeds if you have any varieties of pawpaw that you're like oh you need to get your hands on them or you have i'd love to do a trade we'll buy a few this here's a pulasan which is a small black fruit with a white flesh on the inside it is one in a row that we need to plant a couple more they're absolutely fantastic native to borneo that part of the world but this whole row here is rambutan which are a red furry fruit and i think this year is the year that we'll get a really good crop of them hopefully the bats and cockatoos don't give us too much of a hiding but i'm really looking forward to having a big feed of rambutan we've got a mangosteen row that's that's young and and upcoming we've got a durian row we've got a sapodilla and fruit salad row we've got around eight different varieties of bananas in our mixed banana row this is a gold finger a type of cavendish probably a like 10 kilo eight kilo bunch and we've got some blue javas red dackers there's bells getting thrown out it's starting to look pretty good we need to keep a lot of water a lot of fertilizer on them because they grow so quick especially coming into summer and how do you go about cutting it this this is a dwarf banana the first bunch we've had on it i don't really know how we go about cutting this bunch off but i'd say it's ready it's like a cannonball it's like a ball of a bunch probably six kilos and what we do now is we'll hang that up by a rope in the shade of the shed off the ground so rats and everything can't eat it and that'll naturally ripen over the next couple of weeks stay tuned first time we've ever look like they're going to be sweet though so this is a red or a purple stemmed pawpaw which i believe the seedling stock came from new guinea mike t when you do see this thank you brother they're supposedly a bit firmer flesh still really sweet and a red variety very long very big and get a closer look here carved and fruit probably only a couple of feet off the ground that's shaping up nicely beautiful flowers clean fruit they seem very pest and disease resistant which is what we need around here we're getting to the stage where we're probably 80 to 90 self-sufficient from the animals that we're growing here what we're foraging catching hunting out at the reef or in the rainforest and what we're growing here at the homestead so it's a hell of a lot of work behind the scenes as you can imagine but it's definitely worth it highly recommend getting some stuff in the ground they say that the best time to plant a tree was 10 years ago the second best time is today please let me know in the comments if you've got any questions i'll do a q and a video in the next couple of weeks and if you are passing through the area please stop in and say good day to the family and the team here at the pocket cafe till next time keep ground shit