Urban Permaculture Garden Tour // Edible Gardening to build a more Sustainable Living Lifestyle

Hi everyone, welcome back to my garden. Today we're going to do a full garden tour, a full... oh bee! Today we are going to do a full tour of my gardens, we're going to see what's growing, we're going to harvest what's ready and do a little bit of a garden shop. There's definitely some things that I have been meaning to pick and we've got some rain coming. I need to pick those things before the rain comes. So we're currently out the front of my house, these are my raised garden beds and I've just pulled up some of the shade cloth that has been down. It is time to go for the shade cloth. We've finally, finally finished our summer here in Perth and there's just not as much sunlight in the next few months so I'm going to remove my shade cloth. For now I've just pulled it up, let's go harvest some food. It's hard to know where to start but we're going to start with this first garden bed here. In here I've got sweet potato, I've got some radish seedlings I've planted in some rainbow chard and more lettuce seedlings. We've got watermelon creeping all through here, a big basil plant here in the middle which is flowering and it's bringing in heaps of bees so I'm leaving a lot of those flowers on there to have all the bees so they can help pollinate my watermelons. And down here I have a little baby watermelon so that one's hanging over the side of this planter so I've just got to be really careful when I'm mowing the lawns that I lift that up. In here we've got a zucchini and we've got a big zucchini that needs to be harvested so I'm going to harvest that because it's important that I try and keep on top of my harvesting because the plants are trying to produce seeds for a new generation so if I don't harvest my fruits and vegetables quick enough then the plant's going to be like sweet, done, I've got my seeds, I'm going to die and I don't want that. I want it to keep producing as much food as it can possibly do in a season so that's why it's important to keep on top of harvesting. All right so let's pick this zucchini. So you can either twist them but because this one's quite big I don't want to break the plant so I'm just going to cut that off. That's a pretty decent sized zucchini. I think it's got some weird shapes because of the inconsistent watering especially over this really hot summer so some of my zucchinis are going to be weird shaped. I feel like a zucchini pasta something going on tonight or I've been loving stuffed zucchini, zucchini boats, so many things to make with zucchini. Another zucchini that really needs to be harvested. Oh there might be a couple in there to pick. Got all our rocket popping up, we've got some random radishes, thyme, lettuce, capsicum, a few little ones in there and this is a gourd which has not liked this humid weather. It's got powdery mildew on it so that's another reason to get the shade cloths off to get more airflow through here to help with that. Look at this big I didn't, this has just regrown from other years that I grew sweet potato here so I didn't plant this one this year, it just took off by itself and over here we've got a yellow cherry guava so I've just recently planted that and hopefully that will get really big and bushy and take up that space there. Random little lettuce, more sweet potato, down here we've got the current I've got a white current and it has not liked the heat here but hopefully it will survive I don't water this. Little limes popping up. I've got winter bulbs planted in gaps here so they're going to start popping up soon as well. There's the mandarin. But now we're out the back, this is my back fence line and I've planted that as an urban food forest, small urban food forest style and I've got lots of edibles, lots of fruit trees and we've got different layers so we've got our bigger fruit trees and we've got some middle layer and then some small herbaceous or shrubby layers and then we do have ground covers on most of this garden. So this garden is so low maintenance, it looks after itself, I hardly have to water it. It's well established and I just keep adding little bits here and there, tweaking things but overall it's worked out so great. I have got a few gaps still, there's one gap here which is pretty shaded so I have got a few things but they just take a lot longer to grow in the shade of this massive lovely Norfolk pine that our neighbours have. But it does provide some good shade for us in the summer. So let's take a look at what I've got in this back fence line. There has been some fruit on this story guava but the parrots found it so I don't actually know if there's going to be anything there to harvest but let's take a look. This was loaded, you can't see any, like not even one, let's take a better look. Okay well it looks like the neighbours have devoured all of my fruit, there's not one guava left on this fruit tree. Luckily I was grabbing them in between and just as soon as I saw some ready I was eating those straight off the tree. But we have got more flowers on here so there's more coming. This tree does tend to have multiple sets of fruit throughout the year so hopefully we get a few more to come. As long as I don't get my feijoas, if I did not get my feijoas, do I net my feijoas? This is one of my favourite areas in the garden at the moment, look how lush it is. It is so nice and I've got some hanging solar lights that I've added into the trees so I've got a few more for them to hang. They are so pretty at night, leaving like patterns especially over these bigger leaves. They cast lots of patterns on these leaves which is my Queensland arrowroot and that is a really nice tropical middle layer of my food forest. It's actually getting quite tall now but I have propagated this up and moved it to other parts of my garden so I can continue to get this lush looking screen cover here for this fence. It has edible roots like tubers and the leaves are also edible. So I just pulled this bit out, it's got some roots, it's got some leaves and I'm going to replant this somewhere else in my garden. So this is one that I replanted recently and it's looking great and so we're going to put this one in as well and it's that easy. Free plants from your garden, just bury and we have a new plant and hopefully it will look beautiful and lush all the way along and cover this gap. We have my mulberry, this is my white mulberry and I've taken heaps of cuttings off this. It is getting pretty well established and large now so I'm having to cut that back all the time. We've got my strawberry guava, we've got the Queensland arrowroot as a middle layer in between, sweet potato on the bottom and nasturtiums that are popping up everywhere. I've got lots of other herbs, I've got sage, I've got strawberries, I've got edible flowers, I've got fennel. What else have we got in here? Just replanted some banana pops in there, the cardamom ginger, that's another little low-lying tropical looking plant that does well with the dappled shade of these larger trees. So that's a nice little one on the ground and can be used as a spice. We've definitely got more flowers there. We've got a few beautiful orange zinnias that are left and moving along. It's one of those hard days where it's really cloudy and I think it's going to be good. I can get out and film and then the sun peeps out but it's okay we will work with it. So this here is my Hawaiian guava and again this one is looking really lush and green. We've got some guavas on it that will take a little bit longer till they're ready to go and they're beautiful tropical flavour with a bright pink inside. So I love love love those ones. I am on a hunt for a few more guavas because I do love guavas. There is a wild tomato that's growing up using the guava as a trellis. Again you've got to be really quick getting those tomatoes because the egg critters love them. What else have we got? Then over here we've got an elder flower. So this one is really beautiful as well. We've got my banana, papaya. Down there this is chicory. So chicory's got beautiful beautiful purple flowers. There's a curry plant and then over here we have my feijoa which is my pride and joy. Down on the lower levels there's some strawberries. I've replanted some of the cardamom leaf ginger and some dianthus down there. So as things grow I just replant them out to fill up all of the gaps so it's nice and lush. All right so here we have my feijoa. This is also known as a pineapple guava and they are definitely starting to get bigger and might be ready in the next month or so. They're all at different stages so I've even got a flower. So I don't know I think the tree is a little bit confused with our weather at the moment but there's some really little ones there's some really big ones so it's going to be a sort of continuous harvest which is really exciting. I'm Then behind that I have my lemon tree which needs a prune. It doesn't have much lemons on it at the moment so it's a good time for me to prune it now that the weather's cooled down a bit. It's looking a bit sad like it's lacking some nutrients after this hot weather so I am going to give it a good prune. I'm going to give it a good feed. And then all below it I have sweet potato. So it is tricky especially with having the ground covers with the feijoa because the feijoa fruit are green and then if they drop it's really hard to see them so I mean it's up to you whether you have no ground covers around your fruit trees and so that you can see when fruit has dropped or you just have to go searching for it every day which I don't mind doing either. I another big feijoa. This one is getting so large I trim it back all the time but it still grows so I'm going to give this another big prune back as well. I think I might get find myself a mulcher so that I can mulch up all of these trees that I'm now cutting back so regularly and I can create my own mulch at home and that's another way that I can then bring that in in-house so to speak and I can be self-sufficient in my own mulch which would be amazing but compost bins I've got you know I do a lot of chop and drop especially in this back area here I just chop things and leave them on the ground for them to slowly break down and but I think getting a mulcher will be another really good thing to add to my garden especially now that I've got all these established fruit trees that I'm going to be pruning. So we've got the feijoa here and then obviously we've got no gaps now I feel like we should I might just insert a few clips of my first garden tour here and we can see the difference because I think it's going to be quite dramatic I remember there being so much fence and wanting to plant more and more things in between but also at the same time knowing that these trees are going to be really large and take up that space eventually so it was really hard to be patient and wait for the trees to fill out the space and just plant small things in the middle ground bottom layers and I'm so glad I did because now they each tree sort of has enough space to grow they're definitely definitely closer than recommended but I am working with an urban space and I don't want to have these massive trees so it does work out well for me to have them a little bit more close together and I can maintain them keep them low keep them so I can reach the fruit and yeah it's looking so good I'm actually really proud of this back garden fence it's what I wanted to achieve and I have it so but it did take time I mean I think this is six years in the making here so we are able to garden for the whole year which I think is we are extremely lucky for we can grow food all year round so I'm sort of just tweaking my gardens as I go to find things that are easy that grow well here because I think it's really important to find things that grow well in your area grow well in your specific garden and that way it doesn't feel forced and it just grows by itself and you can move on to developing more areas of your garden so that is what I've been doing I've planted lots of fruit trees I think I've got over you know 25 fruit trees or more and they're all starting to take off now they're all starting to fruit and I think nearly all of them are fruiting which is exciting I also love edible flowers and I try and plant edible flowers in all areas of my gardens because that attracts the pollinators the bees to my garden and it not only looks beautiful but I can then harvest those and use them in teas I can use them in garnishes and make all my food look beautiful which is really important to me because it keeps me inspired and I think that is the key is to do what makes you feel happy what you love and that's going to keep help you continue to keep maintain it long term and that way it's going to be more sustainable so enjoy this long term love coming out to my garden love spending time in my garden and um I just it's just so exciting to be all right so next up let's take a look at my pallet planter gardens these were my original gardens that I started with and they are looking a little bit bare at the moment it does get quite windy here in Perth so I have had to do a little addition last night because I thought it was going to be windy to something that's growing in my pallet lodges so this is a little bit weird but let's go take a look so these are my pallet planters and this year I really wanted to try and grow more things vertically because there is so much underutilized space available when we're growing up and so that's something that I'm really going to push myself to try and do more and more each season is to utilize that vertical space so I have these with Rio mesh um that I found lying around that I've used as a trellis and I've got solar fairy lights all over it because that means that I can see what I'm harvesting at night which is a bonus and it looks really pretty so um I can come out here and just pick one or two things for dinner and I can see so there's something exciting down here that I have done a little DIY on so let's take a look at that look my mask has come in handy so I'm supporting my watermelon using my mask because it was going to be quite windy last night and I was worried it would blow around and snap off and I would be devastated so it's like a little hammock look at him so I'm gonna have to probably so these are um obviously stretchy so it can drop down a little bit more as it gets bigger but I will have to actually make something a little bit more permanent as this little baby grows but look at him so that is so amazing that I'm able to grow watermelon and use this space and I can still grow lots more food down here so down here we've got lettuce we've got this lettuce here which I've been harvesting you can see where I've been harvesting heaps but it is going to go to flower soon so we're probably going to harvest the rest of that and then here we have another zucchini but it looks like someone else has found my zucchini too it's another little baby got a little goji berry in there goji berries can um be quite invasive so I've put them in his own little place here little white eggplants that I need to pick and I'm just leaving all of this space here clear for my winter veggies this one is asparagus and look got the first little baby asparagus so that's exciting this one is my kumquat in a pot but I'm thinking I need to plant this out somewhere it's getting pretty big and then behind here I've got turmeric so I'm really excited to grow my own turmeric and a volunteer from the compost not too sure what that is yet we'll have to wait and see we've got a little cucumber look at these beautiful mint flowers the bees are loving them all right so let's pick some of these little white eggplants these ones are the casper white I'm just gonna pick them all even the little ones all right so this one here is a little bit past it it's gone yellow um it'll be quite bitter so I'm gonna pop that straight in for the worms they will love that look we've got a wild one of our little wild tomatoes so we've got our eggplants, zucchini, fresh basil, some little baby capsicums excuse the grubby fingers, some little chilies, random rogue tomato, some edible flowers and of course this big thing so this is what it is it is a cocoosa I think that's how you say it squash which is this thing here it's the first time I have ever grown it and I think I should have picked this a little bit sooner but I'm excited to try this and see what it's like um I'm assuming it's similar to like a cross between a zucchini and a pumpkin I guess that's what a squash is um but yeah I don't know what I'm gonna do with this but I'll let you know how it goes and if you made it to the end of the video thank you so much if you've got any questions on anything you saw in my garden definitely leave me a comment below and make sure you hit that like button so that I know if you liked this video or not