How I Turned My Back Yard Into a Thriving Food Forest in One Year

So this is the story of my little veggie patch from all the way back at the start when it was an empty backyard to where it is today. But let's go back to the beginning. Back in 2017 I was married and lived in a 100 year old two-bedroom tiny worker's cottage that my husband and I spent almost a year renovating and adding a big extension off the back while we lived in it. It was located in Woolloowin which is inner city Brisbane, Australia and this is where my love of growing my own food began. We also got two rescue dogs Otis and Ella, the two loves of my life. We built two raised garden beds in the backyard and I grew an assortment of kale, chard, lettuce, cucumbers, celery and snow peas and we had lots of pots on the back deck. But in 2018 we broke up, but that's a story for another day. After splitting up I bought a unit off the plan at Stafford, still inner city Brisbane, that had a decent sized balcony that I could grow veggies in pots. I even had a mango tree and a fig tree in a pot on the balcony. Then I met Kevin, the traditional way these days, on a dating site. I had only been in my unit for two years but we wanted to live together and he lived on the south side and I didn't want to move there so we decided to buy a house together at the peak of house prices during COVID. We paid about $300,000 more than we would have if we had bought a year earlier, but the house had everything we both wanted and most importantly it had a decent backyard where I could start my veggie garden all over again. And so it begins. We built our first raised bed out of non-treated hardwood timber. We bought six two by four meter long planks of hardwood and we used the lasagna method for filling it by layering cardboard at the bottom to reduce grass and weeds, then a layer of sugarcane mulch, a layer of compost, chicken manure, then back to sugarcane mulch again until it was full. We ordered a truckload of compost from a landscaping supply company and wheeled it around in the wheelbarrow. It was so much cheaper than buying bags of compost, not to mention the amount of plastic that didn't go into the landfill. The total cost of this raised bed plus fill was $238 and this bed should last me a good 10 years. So that was bed one done and I quickly planted it out with kale, lettuce, spinach and put up a barrier to keep Zuri out. And my mango tree that I had been dragging around for years in a pot finally got a new home in the back corner. I also grew cucumbers in pots and chilli plants for Kevin's mum as I'm not a fan of spicy food. We grew celery, lettuce, tomatoes, corn and my mango tree started flowering. We were harvesting endless lettuce and cucumbers. This one bed was producing a lot of food that we didn't need to buy from the grocery store. It was awesome. We also added a tropical peach tree, my fig tree found a home, we planted a red papaya tree and a lime tree. Ella loved being out in the garden with me, sadly Otis passed away before we moved into this house. Six months later it was time to build another raised bed. We did the same thing all over again, this time the bed was along the back fence between the mango tree and the peach tree. Six more non-treated hardwood sleepers and we filled it with cardboard, old trees we had cut down, compost, chicken manure and so on until it was full. We just let this bed sit until the heat of summer was over and it's always good to let your beds sit for at least a month before planting them out anyway. I also decided that I wanted a white garden so I started painting everything white but then disaster struck. The possums arrived and ate everything under the cover of darkness. I was devastated. So instead of doing the simple thing and adding a hoop netting cover, we took the complicated route and made timber covers with fly screen windows. Timber from the hardware store was about five dollars a plank and we split them in two to make them go further and we got fly screen in bulk from ebay which cost around thirty dollars from memory. We both enjoy making things so this was another fun project for us and we still hadn't gotten around to fixing the paint on the cement but it does eventually happen. We painted these white too to match the rest of the garden. Adding the fly screen was very time consuming but it does work extremely well so it was worth it. I call these covers the brassica covers to keep the white butterfly moths out. I will be making a detailed video about these covers shortly so make sure you subscribe so you don't miss that one. Coming into fall I wanted to grow some snow peas and I decided I needed a trellis for them to grow up. These were going to be grown in bed two at the back and I also needed to cover this bed to keep the possums and zuri out so we got to making a snow pea trellis. We used the leftover timber that we still had from making the brassica covers on bed one. I wanted this one to be quite tall so that I could grow corn and tomatoes in this bed at some stage too. This project was a pretty quick and easy one to make. Once the frame was all put together I painted it white to match the rest of the garden and strung twine to the nails that we added to the back of the frame so that the snow peas could easily climb up and we still hadn't gotten around to painting the cement. It was a great success and The next project was a watering system on a timer so that we could go away on holidays and not have to worry about the plants dying. We had planned a trip to Singapore and Malaysia for June so we had to get this done before then. This watering system went from the water tank on the far side of the garden through the garden bed that had a mulberry tree and two papaya trees to my shade bed that I use in summer and then around to my raised beds. It worked like a charm. In the garden I had some broccoli, parsley and rocket growing and I planted out a ton of beetroot, some kale and some cabbage. Snow peas were starting to climb up the trellis, the tomatoes were getting big, the carrots were growing quickly in their pot and I added a raspberry to a pot to contain it. My peach tree was getting some leaves and my dwarf cavendish banana was starting to grow. I planted out a bunch of strawberries and two finger lime trees into pots. By the end of May the broccoli had grown substantially and my first ever crop of garlic was coming along nicely. And the snow peas were getting taller. I also had some organic potatoes that I saved in my cupboard that needed planting out so I put them into grow bags. This was the first time growing potatoes so I was super excited because I love potatoes. In June the autumn leaves were turning a golden colour so I went and collected a bunch from around their neighbourhood to put into a wire ring to let break down for 12 months. This was an experiment to see how much compost you could make from leaves. I will do a detailed video about this shortly, the results were quite surprising. I was also really excited because my potatoes had started sprouting and the snow peas were starting to produce. The garden was in full swing by July, being the peak of winter which is spring here in south east Queensland. We were harvesting broccoli, cauliflower, snow peas, kale and lettuce daily. Both beds were full to the brim and I was loving it. In August we decided to make a third raised bed. This was the same as the other two and we filled it exactly the same way as we knew this worked well. We were still harvesting winter veggies like broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, carrots, snow peas, beetroots and I also harvested my first ever lot of potatoes. I was blown away by how many there were and I was definitely hooked on growing potatoes after this. Growing them in bags made it so easy. And Ella's hair was starting to grow back. In September we put together the L-shaped bed that I got for my birthday in the back corner. This was going to be my lettuce bed in summer because it was a bit cooler and shadier. This raised bed was easy to assemble with no drilling or screws required. All the pieces just slide together. I'm going to get some more of these and do a video about them as they are so easy to install. In October we made a herb bed under the trees as it is a nice and shady spot there for herbs to grow. Kevin made this cute little picket fence to go around it to keep Zoe out. We also harvested another grow bag full of potatoes. They weren't huge potatoes but there was a lot of them and I started harvesting the first lot of onions. We had to build another cover for the third raised bed so we moved the brassica covers to bed one, the new bed at the front and I wanted a really tall cover for bed two. I found a few designs I liked on Pinterest and we modified them to suit the bed and got to making them. Again we used the five dollar timber and the idea was to make a little house to go on top of the raised bed. The idea was so that I could grow tomatoes, cucumbers and corn in here which are quite tall and I could string them to the beam in the roof to grow up. Did you notice that our cement is finally painted? It looks so much better and of course I painted it white. We only had enough fly screen left from the brassica covers to cover the back and the roof of the little house. So we ordered some more off ebay to do the sides and the removable doors. We got some pretty gold handles for the doors too. Everything fit like a glove and I think it looks absolutely adorable. It's my favorite of the raised beds. It was pretty cheap and easy to make and the fly screen part was a lot easier with this one than it was with the brassica covers from bed one. What do you think of this one? December was about the last of the harvesting before the rain set in for summer and the grasshoppers ate everything. I got two watermelons but only one was worth eating. I picked about 20 beetroot. The sunflowers were blooming. I harvested about 30 onions and four garlic and put them on a drying rack to cure. Some leeks, lettuce, kale and my mango tree had about eight mangoes that I was guarding with my life from the possums. I only got three to eat in the end. So that's the story of the empty backyard that I turned into a thriving food haven. 2024 has been my best producing year yet and I will be bringing you regular videos about that. The garden will no doubt continue to expand and produce more and more food as time goes on. Thanks for watching and if you enjoyed this video please like and subscribe. You may enjoy watching this video here all about how many potatoes I grew from one seed potato.