High-Density Edible Garden on 1/5 Acre | Autumn Food Forest Tour 🍂

Welcome back to my urban food forest garden in Perth, Australia. It's currently the end of autumn and the mornings are finally starting to feel cooler and we've had a tiny little bit of rain. The garden is really hanging in there. It's definitely looking rough around the edges. Today I want to take you for a little look around the garden and see what is fruiting and how my garden is progressing. My garden is high density with over 200 types of fruit trees plus herbs and your veggies and my property is less than a fifth of an acre in total. My goal is to have small amounts of many different types of fruit and to be able to harvest fruit 365 days a year. This means I've said goodbye to spacing rules, utilized dwarf fruit trees, vertical gardens, learnt to multigraft and I keep my trees pruned not only to let light in but also create more green material to chop and drop and feed my soil. If you've been a regular YouTube subscriber you would have seen the progress of how we've transformed my front yard from a bare hot lawn to a mini high density food forest with lots of tropical fruit trees, raised garden beds to grow annual veggies and a mini wildlife pond home to small fish and frogs. So a lot has been transforming here over the last few years and I'll link the playlist if you want to see other videos from that but let's take a look at what is growing, what I've got ripening in this garden. My lemonade tree is loaded and it's the first one of my citrus varieties to start fruiting so it's an early type of citrus if you want to add one of those to your garden to extend your citrus season. It's sweet, you eat it just like an orange but it's lemon flavoured. So we've got a few tropicals in this little section, I've got a sour sop, we've got another papaya which will grow up and be another shade plant. We've got star fruit, the lychee that we just planted in the last video which has, I want to show you guys, all new growth. The moringa which is going to be another one of my shade plants. This is going to give amazing dappled light because of the spaces between the leaves. So it's going to let a lot more light in but in a real dappled sort of fashion which my tropical trees will love. This area is looking quite bare at the moment, I cut back a lot of that Queensland arrowroot to use as mulch but as you can see it's just going to keep popping up and regrowing. This is the bullocks heart that I planted recently in one of the videos and you can see it's shooting new growth as well, that's all new. Even though the leaves look a little bit ratty, that's just the wind. I planted out this little pot, I had a little birdhouse on here but it was basically falling apart so I replaced it with a pot and I've got some sage and some flowers and some lettuce and other random things that I've found around the place. And I've got this little house that I'm going to nail on here, this is going to be another little insect hideout. Right so my linda avocado that's been tucked away in this little shelter from the hot sun, I've taken the, pulled back some of the roof here to let more light in but I am thinking about leaving this part still on because this is going to be a really good windblock, should be enough sun in there. So this is my wildlife pond and it is getting a lot less sun at the moment with the winter sun being a lot lower in the sky. So I don't know, there's not a lot of frogs hanging around, they usually disappear during winter and hibernate or go and find more sun. But there are still some tadpoles so I think those are going to stick around and stay tadpoles until it warms up in spring and summer again. Because the tadpoles need that sunlight to transform. So that's kind of cool because I know I'm going to have more frogs next season. I have just recently planted out my raised garden beds, I was holding off because we've just had no rain, it's been such a hot autumn which is common for Perth, it does tend to do that, summer sort of drags on forever. And I had plenty of other jobs to do in the garden so I held off, I've now planted seedlings as well as a bunch of seeds in between and I've got, what have I got, I've got purple broccoli, I've got mini cabbages, rainbow chard, I've planted sage, kale and lettuces as well as radishes and edible flowers all in between, everything like I always do. I like my gardens to be really densely populated, heaps of stuff in there, it helps keep weeds away, it grows a whole lot more food and I can go out and harvest one or two things off each plant to let light in and just promotes a whole lot more diversity in the garden. And edible flowers in the garden is a non-negotiable for me, I have that everywhere, it not only brings colour to the garden but it also attracts pollinators and beneficial insects which are going to always help my garden. The grasshoppers have been having a field day, chewing through new growth and making the garden look even rattier during autumn. And how stunning is this native haikia flower, this is the sea urchin and it definitely lives up to its name. I've made a lot of changes to my backyard food forest garden and so there's a lot more gaps than usual, it's normally really dense and you can't see the fence but let's go take a look. Down here we've got my erwin mango which is a bit of a dwarf mango, I've got some society garlic, I've got the passion fruit, rosemary and here we have my seed grown papaya which I'm so happy with, I can't believe how big it's grown in such a short amount of time. Bought half a papaya and used those seeds to grow my own and now I have hundreds of papaya plants. And it's got some flowers on it so I'm hoping that some of these will get pollinated soon especially with my other seed grown papayas now flowering as well for a bit of cross pollination. So I planted a bunch of these from seed and I have six I think growing at the moment and I'm basically using these as umbrellas for the garden so you can see the shape of them, it's really hot here in Perth and I need as much shade as I can get and so these papayas love the sun and they can grow tall and act as a bit of an umbrella for the garden as well as providing a lot of food and the great thing about papayas is that you can eat them like a fruit when they're ripe but you can also harvest them earlier and use them as a vegetable more like a carrot with the green papaya. And then under the papaya down here we have my Nagami kumquat and it's loaded in fruit. We've had a really hot season for autumn as usual here in Perth, we just haven't had any rain so a lot of the trees are getting tricked, a lot of the deciduous fruit trees like your apples and your apricots are re-flowering and confused and my kumquat has put on a second set of fruit so it's got some tiny little fruits right next to the more mature fruits so we may get two different harvests out of it this year which will be interesting. Down here in this gap I took out a whole bunch of the Queensland arrowroot, chopped that down, dropped that, used it as mulch and made room for another mango. And this is another reason that I love growing Queensland arrowroot, it's a really good gap filler, it provides wind shelter shade but I get so much green material from chopping this and dropping it which is going to give this mango a really good head start. This is the lemon zest mango and now I've got a whole lot of green material down here to help me build the soil, keep the moisture in and feed the plants. I've got a banana, I left some of these Queensland arrowroots in here and they will regrow because I've left a lot of the rhizomes in the ground. I harvested a bunch here so I can move these about to different parts of the garden but I'm also going to use some of these young ones to try out some new recipes because I do want to have more recipes for these types of unusual foods on my website so if you haven't already make sure you check out my website, my blog, I've got articles and also a lot plants in the garden. So as you can see there's a lot more gaps happening here in the garden and this is where we took out my lemon tree in the last video and replaced it with a giant avocado because my lemon tree was just getting hit with too much gore wasp and I was over it and I want more avocados in the garden so it's actually put on new growth since we put it in there which is really exciting. There's also another visitor that I'm not quite sure about, I haven't done anything, I've tried to research to find out but if you do know what kind of spider this is let me know in the comments. We've got avocado in the corner, another feijoa, a super dwarf peach down here or a nectarine, I can't remember which one, I think it's the peach and the nectarine is out the front and that will only get to 1.5 metres so it's only going to get to about this tall and it's going take up that middle layer of my food forest. Because it's a small space, a small area, I want to try and utilise as many layers as I can, edible ground covers, root crops, middle layers, taller trees and then some even taller trees, canopy trees to give a little bit of shade. Behind this dwarf banana I do have a pomegranate, a multi-grafted pomegranate and it does have a few pomegranates that I should have harvested, it is the right time to be harvesting pomegranates, they are ready in autumn but someone else has bet me to it. So let's harvest those before I lose the rest of the crop. So as you can see someone else has definitely had a good feed on this one but I have got one here that I'm going to be able to eat and I've got another one, another two to ripen that I should probably put bags on so I can get to them first. I've also got the seed grown custard apple in the back there and the yellow star cherry little bush down the front, pink Hawaiian guava which is multi-grafted as well. I've got the large crunchy white one that I had out the front now grafted onto this so eventually if I want to remove that and replace it with something else I have it here, I know it's growing so it's another way for me to get more varieties of fruit trees without having to have more fruit trees. So this gap here is probably the one I hate the most at the moment, I removed my red cherry guava as well as a mulberry from this space here and I replaced it with a pinkerton avocado, a dwarf palmer mango and a plantain banana. So because those are all relatively new they haven't taken up this space yet but I do need to allow space and sunlight for them to grow so I'm just going to have to be patient here. So we've got the plantain banana and I only planted this not that long ago and it's already huge. We have dwarf mango down here, more bananas, the pinkerton avocado which is looking great, nice and bushy, nice and low, lots of branches which we like because we can get a lot more fruit on a smaller plant. So the more branches we have on these the more fruit we can get especially at a lower level so rather than this just being a trunk all the way up I've got it pruned nice and low to maximise the amount of fruit I can get whilst keeping the tree smaller. Then we've got another seed grown papaya which has also just started flowering, behind that I've got a red centre lime, another avocado which is teeny tiny down here, hibiscus, rillinia which has died back but it's also sending off new shoots so I am hopeful for that, it is a trickier one to grow. And then along the fence line to maximise the amount of food I can grow in a small space I have got vertical growing space that has got my gold passion fruit on it. Then a few other things stuck in down here so I've got a shampoo ginger, I've also got a sweet granadilla which is a different type of passion fruit and it's only a little plant but I'm optimistic. As I said a lot of new changes have been happening here, I have been editing this garden so it can't look great all the time, that's not realistic but let's go and take a look at my nursery and I'll show you what I've been getting up to in there. I call this my nursery and it's where I'm keeping a lot of my potted fruit trees as well as things that I'm growing from seed. So the shade is off for winter so that's an update, I am trying to take as much of the things out of here as I can and find homes for them in the garden because I don't want to be looking after so many potted fruit trees next summer. Every week I'm finding a new home for something and until I'm done completely and then the rest of them I'm going to be doing multi grafting on, practising grafts, a lot of them I've grown from seed so if I stuff it up there's no drama there, it didn't cost me anything. So things like this, these are mangoes that I've grown from seed and now that I have a lot of different mangoes in the garden I can start multi grafting them and practising with them. Lots of tidying up happening, I need to sort of pull everything back and sweep it up, yeah I've got apricots grown from my apricot tree seeds, I've got blood oranges growing from seed, what else have I got, a kiwi fruit from seed, pomegranate from seed, lots of things I'm growing from seed mainly just to learn how to grow from seed, also have things that I can graft onto and it's just a great way to increase my knowledge without spending any more money on fruit trees because I'm at capacity at this point. An update on my driveway patch, as you can see a lot of things have been growing in here so let's take a look. First up the star of the show definitely is this low chill nectarine, it's starting to lose its leaves now for winter which is a good thing, it means that I can go to sleep and rest and so that I can have lots of fruit next season. It's why I chose to plant deciduous fruit trees here in the spot because it doesn't get a lot of sun in winter but in summer it does get really hot. This is just extra mulch for the garden which as you can see has a living ground cover, this is New Zealand spinach and it surprisingly has survived the summer. One thing that doesn't look like it's going to survive is the double graft cherry so that's a bit sad but I haven't lost many things over the summer which is super surprising considering how many days we got over 40 degrees. We have in the middle a seed grown papaya here and it has started flowering, this is going to be my umbrella for this garden bed. So as you can see they grow sort of like an umbrella shape and it's going to get a lot taller and it's going to be able to cast a bit of shadow over this during summer to give these trees a little bit of a rest from the hot midday sun. Parsley showing up everywhere, there's a dwarf apricot behind there, a dwarf apple over there, tamarillo in the corner and three kiwi fruits growing up this arbor. Thanks for joining me for a full garden tour, it's been a while since I've done one. Now that I have a lot more plants, a lot more gardens growing it's harder to do a full tour but I am going to break them up and do more updates in the different areas of the garden.