From Lawn to Edible Garden Autumn Tour What I m Planting in March Perth Zone 10b

Welcome back to the garden. It has exploded in growth. I can't wait to show you all the exciting things, all the fruit that is coming on in the food forest. And make sure you stick around to the end because I'm going to be sharing what I'm planting next. Seeds, seedlings, some more perennial crops, as well as a few fruit trees that I'm going to be sneaking in. So let's go take a look at that. So first up, the raised garden beds are prepped and ready to go for a new season. I have removed all the old crops. I have left a few random things in. So we've got some beetroots, some peanuts. These ones are my yellow capsicums, but they've matured because I'm going to be saving seeds from these. So they've turned red. Leaving these on as long as possible so that I can, yeah, save the seeds on those. I have added a little bit of compost, a little bit of worm castings, and then given them a really good deep water before adding on fresh mulch. This is the triple C mulch. And then, yeah, just maintaining the watering on this. Even though there's a lot of things growing in here, I want to make sure that the soil is kept nice and damp, and that the microbes are alive and thriving. Because that is the most important part of this whole setup, is the soil. So I've got to keep that alive. And it is looking pretty good. You dig down, and it's not dry. It's, yeah, really nice and dark and moist. So we keep that nice and covered. And I'm going to be planting seedlings and seeds in here very, very soon. I think this is probably our last hot few days, and then all next week looks really nice and cool. So we will be going mad with the planting. But yeah, they're just looking prepped and ready to go at the moment. This is actually like a jungle. I say this every time we do a tour, but whoa, the growth on this garden always surprises me. I can't believe from a bare patch of sand, we have a full-on jungle. So the moringa, way taller than me, covered in flowers. This is one of my canopy trees to give some dappled light to my tropical section here, with my soursop. I've got an aprium, which will lose its leaves soon. Then the starfruit, which I don't know if you can see, but it's nearly as tall as me. Starfruit, and then there's some custard apples further down there. Feijoa's got fruit on it. Lime's got fruit on it. Little seedling down here is popping up. And then all these Queensland arrowroots, which are looking a little bit ratty, these will all get pruned back to chop and drop and feed the garden. So very soon, once we wait for the last of the hot weather, we will then prune all of this back. So a lot of light will come into this shortly, especially with some of the deciduous plants losing their leaves. But for now, we have a full-on jungle, which is exciting. Also, what the heck, you guys, my seed-grown papaya is out of control. I can't believe how fast this has grown from a tiny little seed. And it is covered in fruit now, not just flowers. We have a fruit set. So that has been one of the most exciting things about this garden. And this is the garden that we transformed from part of my driveway into a mini food forest. So a lot of these plants are deciduous. We've got a lot of stone fruit in here. Apple, nectarine, another apple, two apricots. There's a tamarillo in the corner. And then I've got kiwi berries and kiwi fruit growing here. So a lot of these plants will start to look ratty and drop all their leaves for winter. So they'll let a lot of light in here and the papaya can get up nice and tall and get all of the sunlight. These are Jerusalem artichokes here with these beautiful flowers. I was meaning to cut this back already, but I want to keep as much shade as possible in this garden, so I haven't cut them back yet. But I will be pruning all of these back. I love the smell of the papaya flowers. They're really fragrant. They smell like tropical perfume. And in full transparency, you guys, this is what my hot front yard looks like. There is like pure sand, no grass. And then we have my little syntropic food forest. So we went from a bare patch of lawn, pure sandy soil, to this in just a few short years. Got an avocado, which is still undercover here. I will probably take this off. And then potentially in the next few days, with a whole week of cool weather next week, I may remove the shade cloth. But we've got avocado, a Louisa plum, and a mango as the main crops here in this garden. But then on the hot corners, I've got pomegranates. I've got natives. This is the native hekia and about to send off some flowers, which will be super exciting for the bees and for the birds. And then lots of support plants. So the moringa for canopy shade, pigeon pea for lots of mulch, all of this Queensland arrowroot for mulch. So it's really high density, but there are really only three long-term trees, maybe even two long-term, the avocado and the mango. When they get too big, a lot of this will get phased out. But for now, I'm packing it full of food, full of exciting things. I can't wait to try the fruits on all of these, hopefully in next year. And then we have my banana. This is a dwarf ducas banana. There's some seed-grown guavas in there, kwai mak, sapodilla, pomegranate, another pomegranate on that side. All the things out here in that stinking hot front yard. Another little seed-grown papaya that I just put here because I had a random seed, and it's looking really good. It's going to be like a little mini dwarf. Nashi pear, which is starting, these will all start losing their leaves soon. We've got custard apples in here. Down here, we've got some tree spinach. I haven't tried this yet, but it's slowly getting there. This is one of my mangoes, and I've been pruning back. I'll need to probably prune back a little bit more to let more light in for that. A seed-grown guava. The pigeon pea, doing some beautiful shade. This has honestly been so good at shading out all my custard apples. Tucked in down under here, I've got my Bilox Heart custard apple. You can see all such delicate new growth. It's doing really well in the dappled light of the pigeon pea and the wind block from all this Queensland arrowroot. It's got a really sheltered little spot in there. This custard apple is out more in the open, so it's a little bit more windswept and straggly. Hang in there. Peach. There's an avocado under that shade. Another custard apple down here. You can just see when they get a bit more shade on them, especially in the hot months, the leaves are more open and flat. When they're dry and stressed and too hot, they go more like a taco. The tropical cherry, acerola cherry, is flowering. This is a relatively new addition to the front yard, so that is going to be exciting. I don't know if we'll get fruits, but we'll see. Custard apples in here and mango. It's all looking pretty good. Survived the summer from just having that real high density. The only thing that has really struggled the summer has been my raised beds, and I've basically just paused on them until the cooler season. So we're going to be taking off running very soon on the raised beds. The paw lemonade is so loaded that it's just like hanging down with all the fruits. Some of them have started to split because I have been doing some extra watering, so the inconsistent watering is what makes the fruit split. But look, we're getting more flowers and we've got, you know, like all these fruits, so that's going to give us a spread harvest. We've got all different sized fruits on here. Privacy hedge is doing its thing. You can see like pretty dense cover in there, the lime, the feijoa, blood orange, the little mango tucked in there. The chive flowers are pumping out flowers and the pollinators are loving them. Sweet potato, which is taking up the trellis here, which I will be planting some winter crops on here. Down here, the chilli is pumping out some chillies. It's got lots of flowers on it. It's getting a little bit overtaken by the sweet potato, but I'm kind of letting it just because it's giving it a bit of shade. Down here, my lemon cherry guava is being, we've been picking fruits. Oh look, some fruits to harvest. One, oh I dropped two, and you can pick them when they're a little bit green and they're still really sweet. And we've got lots more flowers and fruit, so it's just continuously pumping out the fruit. All of this sweet potato. Interesting to see if we get much root crop out of that. We've got the Brazilian cherry. This is the black Brazilian cherry and it's got all new growth on it. A little cherry guava snack while we go and check out the pond, see what's happening over there. This is my little mini wildlife pond. We've got lots of tadpoles and frogs. The tadpoles have been eating the lily pads. Still plenty of tadpoles in there. Can you see them? There's a little baby frog hiding in there. It's not the best light. The big frog is back. But we do have to go and look out the back in the backyard for it for us because there is something very very exciting happening out there. Every day I'm out there checking it and I can't wait. It's been one of my big goals in the garden is to get bananas and looks like we have some. This is my pacific plantain banana and it went from a flag leaf to bananas in just a few days and it's been so exciting to watch it develop. I even got so excited about bananas that I went out and purchased another variety so I had to find room for those in the garden and no this isn't the perfect spot. I already have this garden crammed full of stuff but I'm running out of space and I really needed red bananas so I'm sneaking these in here. I love the contrast of the red against all the green with the with the stems and the leaves and one day hopefully some red bananas will be hanging on these. I prepped the with some mixed manure and some compost and then planted them in there. Topped it up with all the chopped up Queensland arrowroot and then some mulch on top of that. I planted back the Queensland arrowroot rhizome so they can regrow and create lots more mulch. I've been growing some longevity spinach cuttings in my pallet planter and they were ready to plant out so I've popped these in the garden underneath my blood orange tree. We're getting a cyclone and that's not something that we get all the time here in Perth so I'm a little bit unprepared but I really don't want my bananas to fall down especially now that one of them has got actual fruit on it. So I want to go to sleep tonight so I've just tied up my bananas as good as I can and taken down the shade cloth because I do not need shade cloth when we're about to get a lot of rain and a lot of wind and no sun. So shade cloth is down so that it's not flapping around and getting ruined overnight and hopefully the garden survives. Everything's looking really beautiful and green before the cyclone so hopefully stays that way. We are back, the storm has passed and it's time to get all of my seeds and seedlings into the ground. So I've got a few seedlings and a lot of seeds. There's also a lot of seeds already in these garden beds from previous years. I let a lot of things go to seed in the garden. My rainbow chard went nuts in those garden beds over there so there's no doubt that that'll be popping up. Lettuces, I always like to go leave to go to seed so I'll for sure have lettuces popping up everywhere, probably in the grass as well. But we're going to get a few things in the ground. I'll put the full list of my whole autumn and winter sowing plan on the screen and I'm basically copying what I did last year. I loved my winter garden last year, not only did it perform really well with our shorter winters but also the things that I grew were things that I really enjoyed eating. So we're going to be planting that again and my two most asked questions when it comes to seed sowing and seedling planting is what ones do I plant from seedlings and what ones do I plant from seeds and also how do I stop the bugs eating them. So I'm going to answer those for you while we plant some of these in the garden. So first up I'm going to be planting out my purple cauliflowers and these are quite large plants so I'll tend to plant these in the middle of my garden bed or on the corners or the edges that way they're not taking up too much space so that they can sort of grow out and take up space out here rather than using all of the space in the gardens and I plant them randomly I don't have a row of one thing I put them in all different garden beds that way they tend to get a little bit differing amounts of sunlight so that gives me some natural that gives me some natural succession not everything is going to be ready at the same time these garden beds here get shaded out from the house before the ones behind me so that works out really well and it also helps with my natural pest management because if I put them all in one spot and the snails find them then they've got a full buffet whereas if I spread them out I am spreading the risk where do I want to put this one and to be honest it's very much random I just pop them in when it comes to planting from seed or from seedling I do a mix of both so seeds are obviously a lot more economical you get a lot more seeds in a packet than you do with a packet of if I'm going to be buying seedlings I'll buy things that take longer to grow so things like my brassicas they're going to take the longest to grow so if I can get them in as seedlings that's going to reduce the amount of time and I'll be able to get food faster whereas from seed things that grow really fast like your asian greens radishes all my root vegetables I plant directly in the garden from seed so things like beetroots carrots radishes their main part of the vegetable is the root so you don't want to be transplanting it and disturbing it you want to plant them right where they're going to grow and that way you're going to get a really good harvest basically the difference between planting from seed or planting seedlings is going to be one time the seedlings are going to be ready a lot quicker than you're planting from seed another factor is finding good quality seedlings and finding the things you want as seedlings a lot of the seeds that I grow are things that I can't really find as seedlings so therefore I just grow them myself from seed if you are later in the season and you're getting closer to winter that can be a really good time to plant seedlings just because you're going to be saving that time but what I will also do is plant from seedling and also plant from seed so that way I get a natural succession and if the bugs find all of my seedlings and eat them all I've still got backups on the way so again it's just the ability to be able to plant extra and plant really abundantly when you're planting from seed because you're not worrying so much about the cost especially if you save your own seeds I do save a lot of my own seeds so things like this like this is a beetroot I have so much seed that I can just put them in everywhere if they grow great if they don't it's not a real concern to me I just plant more and that's something that nature does really well nature doesn't just plant a few things here and there it over compensates and it makes it so much easier if you get pests if you get bad weather or something just you know knocks your plant over and snaps it off I do that myself in the garden as well so having a lot of extras a lot of backups means that you've got a lot more chances of having a successful garden this kale has got like all these different side branches and has become a house for snails so I'm going to actually try and break this off this kale was from my last year's winter garden so yeah I'm going to take that off this one's still in the ground this is still lots of kale but now I've freed up some more room and I can get rid of some of these snails so many seeds are already popping up after that rain I can see some little yellow ones here so these are most likely going to be yellow rainbow chards they've got very yellow stems another benefit of planting seedlings out is that the stems are a little bit harder than the seeds so that can help ward off the pests a bit they like the nice soft stems on things so not saying that these won't get eaten because chances are a lot of them will I'm just saying the seedlings are a little bit tougher than than a seed another thing to note is if you do buy seedlings that often there's multiple different seedlings in one cell so you need to be able to split them up so that you can get more chances of success and you don't have four cauliflowers all trying to grow out of this one little square so I can see there's three cabbages in this so I'm going to split that up very carefully into three that way I've got three chances of success and also if I just left them all together as one they're not going to have enough room to develop these little cabbages I'm putting on the edges of my garden bed because they're quite a low vegetable so if I was to put them in the middle and then I had other big things growing around them they're not going to get enough light so all the shorter veggies I tend to put around the edges and the tall ones I'll either put through the middle or I'll put on one end the end that doesn't block all the light oh my god I can hear the frog now that I've got the seedlings planted I will go ahead and plant a few more in seed trays so that if these ones were to get all eaten I've already got some backups on the way there's plenty of snails about right now I'm going to go in with my seeds and I'm going to do some red stalk celery I love the homegrown celery the seeds are tiny so I'm not even going to bury them peel back some of the mulch sprinkle some seeds in so the next question that I get asked all the time is how do I stop my seedlings getting eaten by snails I do try and show the good and the bad from the garden but I still find people think that I have perfect gardens that don't get eaten by pests and that is not the case I have plenty of pests eating my plants in the garden but some of the things that they do to reduce that is to plant extra continuously keep planting seeds and I can do that by saving a lot of my own seeds so I have excess I plant things randomly so they're all in different garden beds giving them all a little bit of a different level of risk all my eggs are not in one basket and then I and then with my seedlings I go and pick up a bag of used coffee grounds from my local cafe so these I sprinkle around all of my seedlings and the newly little seeds that I see popping up and I find that works really well you do have to keep reapplying it if it rains or you water the garden and you wash it off they are back to being vulnerable so it is something that I do throughout the growing season until these stems are a little bit harder and can stop and I find it the coffee grounds help with the slugs and the snails and the slaters and the slaters are probably my biggest troublemakers in the garden they ring back the outside which stops all the nutrients flowing up the stem and so the plant basically dies or they just eat the whole plant completely so I I've planted my seedlings so I'm going to sprinkle some of these coffee grounds because I don't use any chemicals in my garden I definitely do not use slug baits or anything like that at all I would rather have my plants eaten than put chemicals on them that's not the reason that I am growing food to then go and put chemicals all over them so with the seedlings I just come along and sprinkle some coffee grounds on them on the leaves on the stems everywhere and I found this to be the most successful option I've tried so far I've tried eggshells I've tried a lot of things but for me coffee grounds are easy readily accessible free and they seem to do the job coffee grounds also do add nutrition to the garden and nitrogen so good for your leafy plants I mean things like our cauliflowers and our brassicas don't want too much nitrogen but just a sprinkle like this hasn't seemed to trouble my gardens at all so even plants like this I'm sprinkling in the coffee grounds there's a lot of snails living in there so hopefully that will move them on elsewhere once I start getting to a point where I'm harvesting these plants I don't coat them in coffee grounds they're usually hardy enough to withstand the pests so it's more for my young vulnerable vulnerable plants so I just keep a bag on hand and during the start of the planting season I'll come out here every day and check because there'll always be seeds popping up every day and when that new little seed pops up it's super vulnerable so I want to make sure that I can protect it with the coffee grounds I can already see lots of little seeds popping up now so it's a good time for me to just give the whole garden a bit of a sprinkle so this is where I had a big rainbow chard you can see remnants of one of the old plants here I've left in there was another one here and another one here and already the little seeds are starting to pop up I didn't plant these these have just dropped from letting one go to seed so they will no doubt be throughout this whole garden and once they're a little bit bigger I can dig them up and move them about or just leave them where they are I noticed this little seedling down here which I didn't plant it's got a yellow stem on it so I am assuming this is going to be a yellow rainbow chard because that is something that I did have growing in this garden bed I saved some of my pink beautiful pink cosmos flowers and I do like to just have flowers in the garden regardless of the if they're edible or not just some flowers for the bees so I'm gonna sprinkle some of these in and then I'll just continuously be adding layers and layers of different seeds so I've got radish seeds onion seeds sugar beets and then a whole bunch of my own saved radish I've got heaps more inside then I will be just sprinkling those all in between because they're going to grow really fast and give me some harvests while I wait for the rest of these things to grow so after that storm all the wind blew off a lot of my feijoas which aren't quite ripe but feijoas do ripen off the tree so we're going to go and see what we can find bit of an east egg hunt the tricky thing with having edible ground cupboards under feijoa is that you do have to go hunting for them regularly because you don't want them to be rotting under the tree but the the benefits of having this living ground cover and having that moisture retention over the summer months outweighs that for sure so we just have to go on a little bit of a hunt I probably should put down some cardboard or something when it's about time for them to be ready so that I can easily just see them that would be a good idea actually oh gosh there's so many I might need a bigger bowl the first feijoa harvest of the year a nice big bowl full that will not last long