Full edible GARDEN TOUR _ rare fruit tree collection ~ October 2024

Hello and welcome back to my garden. If you are new here, my name is Holly and I am gardening in Perth, Australia, which is about zone 10B. I've got food forest style gardens, we've got raised garden beds and a whole bunch of potted fruit trees. So let's take a full tour, see what's growing and a bit of an update for October, which is spring here in Australia. So this is my first row of fruit trees. This is the oldest fruit trees out here and it starts off with a lime tree that is absolutely covered in baby little limes. So I've just finished harvesting the last of the limes last month and now it's able to put all its energy into all the new fruits. So I'd say a lot of these will drop off, it won't hold them all, but I think this is going to be my best year yet for the limes, which is great because this has been one of the slowest of my fruit trees to get going. So it's about six years old or more and yeah, hasn't been a big producer to date. So this garden bed is a lot like a food forest style garden. I've got some larger trees and then I've got sort of middle layer and ground cover plants as well to try and protect the soil. I also have edible flowers and root crops. It's all happening here in this one garden bed. This is one of my grafted feijoas, this is a Nazimets variety and this I only planted last spring, so it's quite new. It is starting to flower, so we'll see if it holds any fruit. And we have a mango. This is my blood orange, this did so well and it's putting on all new fruits. So like most citrus trees, it's going to flower in spring and then the fruits will be ready next winter. So you do have to wait a little while for these to be ready to harvest. And then down the bottom here, I've got some calendulas, which are all self-seeded from one plant over there. I just scatter seeds everywhere. We've got yarrow, which is contained in this garden bed, and I'm hoping it's going to be a really thick ground cover to try and protect this garden from summer because this is so hot in summer. The heat in summer is probably one of the biggest struggles I have with this garden. So it's why I plant so close together, so densely, is so that they can all help protect each other and it's not just like one sole barren plant in the garden bed. I'm getting absolutely roasted, so things are really densely planted and eventually over time, as things grow, I will remove or prune things back. But that's really my strategy out here, is to just plant densely and use any of the prunings as mulch. So along from the blood orange, we have the guava, I haven't seen any flowers on it yet. This one is still pretty young. It did get a couple of flowers last year, but they didn't hold to a fruit, so I really really am hoping to get some fruit on it this year. I have got a few grafts on this mandarin, this is my hickson mandarin, and I don't love it. I was going to remove it, but I haven't, so now I'm just grafting different things onto it and it's going to be more of a cocktail tree. So I've got grafted on here a red grapefruit, a lime, and also a variegated lemon, but I only did them about a week ago, so let's see if they hold. Now after the mandarin, we have got another feijoa, and this one is a double grafted feijoa. So I grafted a white goose onto a duffy, and again I planted this in spring last year, so it's a year old, has been really slow growing out here, because it's very dry and hot, and last summer was intense, so they really struggled last summer. So I'm hoping to get a burst of new growth this spring. This one here, this is my lemonade. So the lemonade has some massive thorns on it, this has been a huge producer since I first planted it, it's a powerhouse, it throws out so much fruit, and I love lemonades because you can eat them fresh like an orange, but they're lemon flavoured. Right on the end of the row I do have a dwarf Thai mango, the king Thai mango, and then there's herbs and all sorts of things planted in between. This was supposed to be the walkway, but I have too many plants and not enough space, so I've started planting out the walkway, but I have kept them really flat so I can still walk past. This is a hybrid, I think it's like some sort of plum cot, I'm not sure what it is, but I have multigrafted it, so I've got Amber Jewel on here, I've got Satsuma Plum, and Santa Rosa Plum, so there's four different types of stone fruit on this one plant. And then along here I've got a double graft avocado, a reed and a brogdon, and then this one, this is one of my favourites, this is the linda avocado, so this is quite a rare avocado, it's a B type avocado, so those again aren't that easy to find, and it's absolutely covered in flowers, so don't be alarmed if your avocados are dropping all their leaves at the moment, they are pushing out all their energy into the flowers, but there are lots of new leaves about to come through really soon. So this avocado is quite a big fruiting avocado, and I don't know, if it tries to fruit I might let it have one this year. This is a blood peach, or a red fleshed peach, this is called, in New Zealand it's called the black boy, it's also got a French name. So I just planted it this winter as a bare root, here I've got my custard apple, this is the paxton prolific, and on this side is my african pride, and it's lost all its leaves but it is about to push new growth soon. And then in between here all squished into this garden bed is my tropical section, so we've got an abayou, another seed grown tamarillo, starfruit, and a soursop. So this space in here is really protected in between these two rows from wind and the hot sun, as well as any cold, so it's a really nice little microclimate in here for them. This garden bed is pretty new and it's still developing but it's working pretty well, we've got mulch lines down here, so these outside lines I cut back, so they were really tall, now they're all low where I've cut them back, but they'll grow again by the time we get summer. My avocado, I pruned that back lower so it can be a lower bushier plant rather than like a really tall one, and that is the choquette avocado. I did plant a newbie in here, this was where a mulberry plant was, but I swapped it out for the Louisa plum, which is a New Zealand plum, it's huge and something that I've always loved, so that's in place there. Mangoes putting new growth, pigeon pea, keep cutting this back, keeps producing more, love this one for creating mulch. Everything is a little bit slow because I did hack so much back during winter, lots of pruning, and now we're getting the rain, we're getting the sun, so we're having lots of new growth, but I think over the next few months this garden will look a lot lusher, but I'm pretty happy with it. My starfruit is alive and my soursop is alive, and I feel like that is an achievement in itself because those ones I found really tricky, and having them here in this little microclimate where they're squished between two rows, they're getting protected from the cold, the wind, and then hopefully this summer they'll get some protection from the hot sun, because I'm going to let these ones get a lot taller. But also, down here on the corner, this is a really hot sort of corner, and I've planted a pink flowering rosemary, and I think that's going to really help keep this nice and protected. These flies in my eyes are really annoying. So some plants that can really handle the heat, I'm putting them sort of on the corners as sort of structures, they're not going to die, they're going to be able to help create shade for the other things around them to thrive. So update on the rose garden beds, as you can see a lot of stuff has gone to flower and to seed in the garden, it's time for a refresh video, so we are going to be getting a whole trailer load of soil to top this up, and get ready for another season of growing here. I mean there's still stuff in here, we've got celery, lots of snails, radishes, lettuces, all sorts of stuff that have just been growing from me self-seeding every year, but it's definitely time for a refresh in terms of my rose garden beds. So we are going to do that in upcoming videos, and let's take a look at the pond. So a pond update, it's looking a little bit bare, some of the things that I had planted beside the pond were pineapple sage, which I love, and I've been trying to find some more because it died off, I haven't been able to keep it as a perennial, it seems to only be able to do annual in my garden. So I am on the lookout for some more pineapple sage, but I have got some calendula that I planted from seeds over there, I planted some thyme, and we've got yarrow and mint, and I did add this little miniature sunset nectarine, so it's got beautiful red foliage, it only grows to a metre and a half, so this space is under the eaves, and it doesn't get much sun in winter here, so this will be fine because it's going to be asleep in winter, but in summer it's quite hot, so I think this could be a really good option, and it's fruiting. And fish are all fine, I have one frog that's come back, so we had a whole bunch of frogs last season, and only one has come back recently, he's been gone all winter, they hibernate in the garden and they come back once the weather warms up, and I've noticed if it starts to rain and we get bad weather, he disappears, but I'm really hoping a friend is going to come. Wow, I do have quite a few fish, but yeah, the pond, again, like a lot of the garden, I think it's looking a little bit bare, and I'm just waiting for that new flush of growth to come on. And this is my nursery, so this is where I keep a lot of my plants, my cuttings, new things that I've added to my collection, and that seems to be an ever-growing space at the moment. It's also if I need a little bit more protection, because I have got this undercover for the summer, and there is a shade cloth that I put up here over the summer. So let's take a look around and see what we've got fruiting, what's happening, some grafting that I've done here. So first up here we have two apricots, these are my two new additions, which I'm very excited about. One is actually a hybrid, a cross between an apricot and a plum, it's called an aprium, and it is the cotton candy variety, so I just picked that up, and this one, which has fruit on it, very exciting, is a double graft. So this has two different types of apricots on it. So it has the early Newcastle, which definitely is getting the early, because it's already got fruit, leaves, everything, and the other side has a Trevat. Both of these are low-chill, so going to be good here in Perth, and I am so obsessed with apricots at the moment, so there's a few in my collection. Down here I've got a couple of rare avocados, so this is the avozilla, or jumbo, or big daddy, it's got lots of different names, I'm not entirely sure what one it is, but massive avocados, and I have two of those. I also have an abu, which is another rare tropical, so I've got that here, keeping it a little bit more protected. We have my New Zealand yams, a few pots of these, I have different sized pots, some of them are bigger. We have a black pomegranate, so this is one of my special ones, and I've started taking cuttings from this and putting it onto my pomegranate tree in the back, and propagating a few in other little garden beds. We've got a fig, we've got seed grown avocado, this is a random plum that I wasn't really sure what it is, it's never really fruited, but I've grafted on a rare heritage apricot, so this is the rival, so you can see the little bit of green that's pushed through from the graft. I'm so happy about that, because I did think that it wasn't going to take, because the scion wasn't very fresh when I got it, but it looks like it's going to work, very excited. And then this here, these are raised up on some homemade metal trellis, what would you call that, shelving situation, and that really helps with drainage here, so having the pots a bit raised up off the ground helps with the gravity getting that water out of the pot so it doesn't go rotten over winter. And then in the back you can see we have got blueberries, so I went on a little bit of a blueberry collecting phase, and I've got misty, I've got burst and kisses, and I've got sharp blue, and then over here this one is the biloxi. Sit, you can eat it, maybe not the best idea, he might start picking his own. Oh, and also this massive one in here, how could I forget this, this one is sunshine blue. I've got white current, and these have some little fruits on them, so I've got this bear rooted this season, this one down here is a petanga tuber, a yellow one, I've got a little dipotacaba, more yams, lemongrass, and then this is a peachurine, so a cross between a peach and a nectarine, my yellow tamarillo that's starting to really produce some fruit now. Look at these flowers, wild. I also got these two new avocados, these are unknown so I picked these up at Tass, Tass one if you are in Perth, and they have $35 avocado trees that are grafted, but the trick is they don't know what they are, but out of the list of things they could be, I didn't have any of those anyway, so it doesn't really matter, an avocado is an avocado, and I'm excited to have a few more. Over this side is where we have my new little avocados, the jumbo massive avocado, blueberry, this is a lychee, so again this is something that I really want to protect over the summer, a grape, a mango that I grew from seed, another random grape cutting, which I don't know what that is, this is another lychee that I'm trying to resurrect, and I've got lots of stuff happening in these planter boxes so I'll show you that as well, dragon fruit mess, this one is a longan, so this is much hardier than the lychee, then down here I've got another grafting project going on with two different apricots, finger lime, and it's starting to push out some little flowers, so hopefully we get some fruit this year, chocolate pudding fruit, a peach, and you can see the clips on my fence attach up to my undercover area, so that this can all be shaded, we have got figs, most of these are unknown, I don't know what they are, some of them I do, pristine prolific, celeste, that's a brown turkey, this is another apricot, I need to fix this, I'm trying to spread the branches out so they're wider, but I also grafted another one on there, so there's a different type of apricot, that's a paddison, this big fern looking thing is asparagus, and it's growing out of this planter box, this is my asparagus planter box, I've got a caracara orange, some little fruit, more figs, this one is a star gooseberry, some rainwater that I collect for my tropicals, and then this planter box is where I'm doing a lot of my cuttings and seeding things, so a bunch of mulberry cuttings from when we removed my mulberry tree, and you'll see those in other parts of the garden, raspberries, these are the red raspberries, these are little pomegranate cuttings that I've taken, there's little tamarillo seeds that I just put in there, this one is a yacon, so I'm trying to grow that so that I can get a few more to plant in other areas of my garden, this is a rare mango, this is my coconut cream mango, I've got a relinia that I need to cut, it's very long and it's starting to push new growth out the sides, a jackfruit, a custard apple, hillary white, and it's starting to push all new growth as well, this is another rare avocado, this is the Mexicola avocado, another custard apple from seed, lots of my seed stuff going on here, and cuttings, sapodilla from seed, mulberry from seed, so yeah this is my little nursery and collection point, and in here we've got chilies, a passion fruit I grew from seed, more cuttings and things, a young berry, and there's a blackberry in that one, along with more cuttings and things, oh a little apple grafted, this one here I've got a loquat that I'm not putting in the ground because it's going to get to be a big tree and I don't have room for that where I am right now, this is the guava that we removed from the back garden, it's coming back to life after dropping a lot of leaves, and I've started grafting onto that, so I have put some yellow guava onto this, and welcome to the back garden which is looking really bare at the moment since I did a whole bunch of changes in one of my previous videos, you would have seen me ripping out some of my fruit trees and replacing them, so let's take a look and see what I've currently got growing and how it's looking, so starting off over here along the back fence I have a yellow passion fruit, which a lot of this fruit is getting ripe at the moment, I've been picking passion fruit nearly every day, this is the shadiest corner of my garden, so we have monstera, nasturtiums, I actually have found some shampoo ginger, so that's really exciting, I've got that planted here in a nice cool spot, and then coming along we have a hibiscus, some seed grown papaya, and this is the red center lime, which is sort of a hybrid between a finger lime and a kumquat or a mandarin, something like that, so this one down here is my avocado, this is a pinkerton avocado, and I chose this because it's branching off really low, it's nice and bushy, so I'm going to get a nice short bushy tree to go in here and fill this gap that used to be guava, and then I've got my plantain, pacific plantain banana, a dwarf, this is a dwarf palmer mango, which is covered in flowers at the moment, this one is my hawaiian guava, but I've also started grafting a few different types of guavas on here, another banana, and this one has a pup which is white, so I'm not sure what the goal is with this, if you've ever seen this let me know, I just don't imagine this is going to survive very well, but I'm also interested to see what happens, this is my azerbaijani pomegranate, and it's got a few different ones grafted onto it, that's the seedless jaloe, and I put the black one on there too just recently, a little miniature sunset peach, super dwarf peach, and then my feijoa, feijoa, lavender, lemon, which is covered in new little lemons, lots of baby lemons, spring is the best time to do most of the grafting, and so I've been busy trying to get as much grafting as I can done before the season ends, and I can't do that anymore, and I have to wait till next year, so that's where a lot of my focus has been, and just learning new skills, learning how to graft, trying out different techniques, and also different types of fruit trees, so last year I started with stone fruit, and I found that really easy, this year I've been testing out doing other things like citrus and passion fruit, and just adding those skills to my toolbox, so I can start adding other new varieties to my garden without actually having to purchase or get a whole new tree, I can just stick a different branch on one of my plants, boy, leave the fly, leave it, leave it, so let's take a look at this new improved dry flow patch, the arbor has kiwi fruits, and they are both the female and the male, look like they're taking off and doing well, so I have a female on either side, and then one male, I've got my double grafted cherry, I've got my super low chill nectarine, which is the nectarina, I've got my red fleshed apple, a bunch of other mulberry cuttings, and a dwarf apricot, and another seed grown tamarillo there in the corner, and these weeds just keep coming up because this garden has self-seeded so much over the years, but I'm just pruning it back, chopping it, dropping it, trying to keep the soil covered at all times so that it doesn't dry out, and yeah, interested to see how this develops over the next few months, and if we can get the kiwi fruit up over the arbor, I think kiwi fruit are going to be tricky, they don't so much love the heat here, but this garden bed only gets morning sun, so we should be all right, and I've planted them right at the back there, which gets even less sun, so we will see, it's an experiment.