Autumn What I am Harvesting Planting NOW in My Edible Garden 1 5 Acre Food Forest zone 10b

If you've ever felt like your suburban block is too small or your soil is too poor to grow food, you're not alone. The key to a thriving garden isn't doing everything at once, it's starting small and working with nature one season at a time. Hi, I'm Holly and I've been turning both my front yard and my backyard from a bare lawn into a productive high-density edible garden and food forest designed to grow food all year round. Instead of being overwhelmed with having to preserve large harvests, my focus is different. Small amounts of many different fruits, herbs and vegetables so there's always something ready to eat. They smell like lollies. Right now we're in autumn and it's a very busy time in the garden. New seeds are going in, fruit is ripening, clearing and pruning is underway and the garden is changing fast. Join me to see what I'm harvesting, sowing, planting next and how I keep a steady flow of food It's been a couple weeks since I first planted out these raised garden beds. We've got some seedlings of purple cauliflower, some mini cabbages, plus a whole bunch of seeds. One, some that I sowed and some that I didn't, that are just popping up because I let things go to seed each year. So I can see lots of lettuces and I did not plant any lettuces. I grew them last year and I let them go to flower to save the seeds and the seeds just scatter sort of everywhere. So I have lettuces popping up in the grass, in the garden, everywhere which is fine by me. Free plants, things that I didn't even have to put any effort into growing or as a bonus and having extras so that if the bugs eat them I'm all good. But today I'm going to be planting another round of seeds and I've got a whole bunch here, some of them that I've collected from my own garden and some that I've purchased. So we're going to do a whole another round of seeds and just fill the gaps. All right so a lot of the things that I've got here are actually flowers because I've got in some of my core veggie crops, I've got in some of my filler crops like my lettuces and my radishes all in the gaps. But I want to make sure that I've got a lot of edible flowers so that I can attract the pollinators, I can attract all the beneficial insects to help me with my natural pest management but also make my gardens look pretty because I do like my gardens to look nice. I can see already behind me lots of little hoverflies and native bees and honeybees on the flowers that I do have in my garden so it's really really important. I've also got in here my really lazy seed saving as I just cut the seed head off and put it in a paper bag and then all the seeds sort of fall to the bottom. Some of them are still in here, this is an onion and each one of these little pieces here has probably multiple seeds, at least one to two seeds and all I have to do is just sprinkle them in the garden. I'm not even going to bury them, they're tiny seeds and they'll make their way. This is like the ultimate in lazy gardening and the reason I can get away with this is because I literally have hundreds, this cost me nothing, I saved one flower and there's like hundreds and hundreds of seeds so I'm not worried about like all of them germinating. So here in the middle I've got my Tuscan kale and I did a post about this on Facebook recently. This is my favorite kale to grow, it's really the only kale I like to grow. I like the flavor of it, I like the texture, it's not as spiky. The snails are enjoying a lot of it at the moment but this one I grew from last year so it's already here, I've given it a prune, I can now start harvesting from it so I'm getting basically instant winter cool season harvests while I wait for all of these little seedlings to start sprouting and there are so many seeds in here you guys, some of them are just like so random, like there's tomato seeds popping up. I obviously didn't plant tomato seeds for the cool season but they've self-seeded in the garden and decided it's time to grow so I mean who am I to stop them? I'm certainly not going to pull them out, they can do their thing. A little self-seeded tomato next to a RIP giant grasshopper, not sure what happened to that guy. Cabbage seeds, a little something, might be a beetroot. Some of them I will dig down and put in the soil just in case my ones on the surface don't make it down deep enough but I find they do. I mean I've, I literally scattered radish seeds like this and I'll show you all the radishes have already popped up and I didn't go through and like bury them at all but one of the things I always like to do is try multiple different ways so if I decide I'm going to go out here and just sprinkle these all like this and none of them pop up, meanwhile it hasn't cost me anything but I do want to actually get a harvest so what I like to do is do a few different ways so I'm sprinkling them, also go through and just bury a few. There's more tomatoes popping up, the heck. Down here, this is lettuce popping up in the grass, there'll be all sorts of things so we'll start seeing some more seeds down here so more lettuce that I didn't plant, lettuce, lettuce, some radishes that I've just sprinkled around and they're popping up. They will be everywhere because I just scatter them and I'll keep doing multiple sets, lettuces, chard, and this garden bed's still pretty full, the chilies, the edible flowers down here, radishes down there, my, I think it's a little bit of a steak, my banana capsicum, still putting out some capsicums and these red ones I'm going to harvest because I'm saving them for seeds and they're nice and ripe now. We'll let the plant put more energy into growing. There's another one here, I'm gonna pick this so we can save these seeds from the yellow capsicum. So this one right here is the poppy seeds that I saved from my poppies that I grew last year and I want to sprinkle those throughout the garden, if you can hear. Lots of seeds inside so we are going to put these in the edge of the food forest so I can get some beautiful poppies growing along there, adding some colour to all the green. All right so we're going to be seed fairy sprinkling these, if I can get into it. So many seeds. So last year I just scattered them and not a lot of them popped up so I am going to find the soil and just leave them on top of the soil. There's a lot of mulch in here so it's probably not the best place. Right on the edge. I was just sprinkling some seeds and spotted this little guy, look at him, he's so little. Another thing I'm doing at the moment is removing all of my shade cloth because the weather's cooling down, although today is very warm, I'm already sweating, and letting some light in for the winter months. Oh my god that bird just about took me out. These are my kiwifruits and my kiwi berries that are under shade and they've managed to survive summer in this very hot, confined space so we're going to let them breathe a little bit, get a little bit of sunlight before they go dormant. It's literally a jungle in here. Oh this one's grown through a hole. It's so hot, I'm sweating, it's like a sauna in here. I don't know if you can see but I'm literally dripping. Poor kiwifruit picked the hottest day to do this but it's all right. A few things on my list of things to do is to tackle chop and drop on the Jerusalem artichokes and pruning my dwarf apricot which has grown insanely in a year. It's huge. So we're going to be doing a big prune back on that because I'm going to be pruning my apricots now in autumn rather than in winter because they are more susceptible to diseases. So we want to one, get them some good airflow because it's pretty much packed in there and two, get the height down, get it pruned so that I can keep it nice and short. Yeah we've still got three kiwifruits alive. I thought one of them died and luckily I didn't pull it out because it's reshot. So I don't know, maybe that's a tip. If you think something is dead maybe leave it a little bit longer and see if it will regrow because this one was dead to the ground like I did not think it was coming back but look at it. So hopefully this one can grow enough before it goes dormant. Little lemon guava snacks. Something else that I've been dealing with is lots of split fruit. These pretty much, most of my mandarins are split from that huge downpour of rain so picking these so that they don't get any bugs and fruit fly in them because they're not gonna be edible. Lots of new growth on this starfruit. I haven't seen any flowers yet. This is a grafted tyenite variety so it should flower soon. Welcome back to the garden. It's time to go harvest some fruit so let's go see what we can find. So these are my Hawaiian guavas and you can see they're starting to go yellow and we'll take a look inside because it's crazy. I love these because they look green, not that interesting on the outside but on the inside actually so juicy. Look at the colour. My hands are full. I need to take the basket in there. Look at all these. So I don't even know if this one is quite ready but I could see it was split. This could be from all the excess rain that we had recently just pumping too much moisture into these and they're splitting open and also someone else's had a go on this side so it's definitely time to pick it. We'll see. It tastes good. This is my Azerbaijani pomegranate. It's a pretty big one. So I've been coming out here and picking feijos every day looking for ones that are on the ground or ones that are touch ready where I just touch them and they fall off the tree. And here we have my seed grown papaya. So it is getting massive. I have been pruning some of these lower leaves off and just chopping and dropping those. I pruned back all of the Jerusalem artichoke so that's letting light in and because these are all stone fruit, we've got apple, nectarine, apricots, they are starting to lose their leaves. So just you can see handfuls of leaves coming off so that again is going to let light in but it's also going to create some free mulch. So again that's why I love having deciduous fruit trees in and around the gardens. I have already pruned this back once because it was just getting too big and smacking into other things. This tree has grown so vigorously. This is a low chill nectarine and I'm going to tidy it up. There's lots of branches crossing in. It needs a good tidy up so we'll be pruning this and my apricot trees because they are huge. I can't believe how much growth I've had on the apricot. They're dwarf apricots and it is literally way taller than anything. But yeah I still just can't get over this papaya and it's loaded in fruit. Since I first started my gardens I've been really focused on edible plants, fruit trees, herbs, annual veggies and all the things that I can eat. But over time I have been adding more and more flowers into my garden because the more diversity I have in plants, the more diversity I get in beneficial insects. Things that are going to help me keep the pests at bay and I've been noticing a lot more birds coming into my gardens now that they're getting more established. There's more places for them to hide as well as I have tall structures and things for them to have safety on before they drop down. So because of that I want to add more food for them and more reasons for them to come and spend time in my garden and keep my pests in check. So I've picked up a few extras. I have planted seeds. So we've planted a bunch of seeds of dianthus and I already have dianthus established in my raised garden beds in all different colours. It's one of my favourite plants to add into a garden, into a veggie patch because the flowers are edible and they're really easy to grow and they grow sort of all year round as well. So I've got dianthus, I've added in some cosmos. They are stunning beautiful flowers and poppies. So we sprinkled some poppy seeds all in my food forest garden beds and I have a few native flowers by the pond. What else do I have? Sweet peas. So I've got some sweet peas here to climb up the arbour to add lots of colours, lots of flowers for the bees. But I've picked up a bunch of extra flowers that we're going to plant today. So these ones here and I fear I may have started a new collection problem. I do that. I really like to collect things. So this could be dangerous but I'm planting salvias. So let me know if you're growing salvias and what ones you're growing because I feel like I need to get all of them. The ones that I've got today are the Lake Tahoe and this one is a beautiful purple which is one of my favourite colours if you hadn't noticed already. Then I also got the Lake Strawberry. So a pink one and this which is my favourite herb. This is an edible one. This is Pineapple Sage. So you'll have heard me talk about that a lot in my videos. It is definitely one of my favourite herbs to grow but I've never been really successful as keeping it as a perennial. So I do have to plant it every year. So here we go. We've got some Pineapple Sage which has beautiful red flowers. The birds love these so I'm hoping these other salvias as well are going to be really provide some nectar for the birds. Then this one this is just a random one that I was obsessed with the colour of and this one is called Pacific Reef. So it's got like purple daisy flowers. Look at these. Stunning. So that's the label and yeah I just couldn't go past this. So this one's a really low cottage shrub. It only grows like 15 centimetres tall. So this one will be a nice ground cover somewhere. So we're going to find some homes in the gardens for these. This Pineapple Sage is going to go into my raised garden beds. It's a herb that I use all the time in salads and cooking. It's a very sweet pineapple-y fragrance and also the flowers are delicious on any baking as a garnish or just salads in general. They are so good. So this is where I had my Pineapple Sage growing last year. The remnants are still here and I was hoping that it would self-seed but we'll have to wait and see but I did definitely want to get it going again and because it was here I am going to put it back in the same spot. I have had trouble in the past with growing Pineapple Sage so I feel like don't fix what isn't broke. We will go round two. So just loosen up the roots a bit. It looks quite tight. I feel like this was a really good spot for the Pineapple Sage because of all the flowers and the birds. They had this little ledge they could pop along and so they could easily come in here and harvest the nectar as well as the trellis. I've got a few bits that have broken off so we might try and grow those from cuttings. Why not? Right so this Purple Salvia I'm going to pop in here. I'm going to make some room and pull out some of these Queensland Arrowroots. I should really have my gloves on. I always forget to put gloves on I just get carried away but we should really have gloves on. A nice sunny protected spot. So this pink one I'm going to put right here on the corner. This is just sweet potato and this gets plenty of sun. And lastly I'm going to put this one under the So we'll put it over here. It's so dry because the soil is not covered and I really want to get the soil covered. So hopefully this can grow around. I'm thinking about doing some edging around these so that I can easily get in with the weed eater. While I was in here the other day I did notice that there is a sweet potato poking out of the soil. I'm going to harvest that before some other little crusher does. So sweet potatoes one of the great things about them is that they start to push themselves out of the ground when they're ready. So you can either harvest them when the leaves start to die back in autumn winter or when they literally jump out of the soil. So that's a pretty big one in there. Oh my god it's so heavy. Alright so we have got a giant sweet potato harvested. Let's see if there's any others in there. That one was massive. So this will make room for me to plant a few other things. Oh I can actually see there's another one poking out of the ground. So this one is a bit smaller but poking out of the ground. Yeah I'll prune back all of this so I can make room for some other veggies. I already can see these beetroots in here and it will let some light in for my custard apple. Any little piece of root left in the ground will regrow in spring so I'll definitely have sweet potato popping up in here again without even having to plant it. And it's been a really nice shade cover during summer. Alright so made some space. I can now use this side of the arbor because this side's got the peas planted and now I've freed up some space over here so we can plant something else. Lots of light in for the custard apple. So in the backyard I've ended up taking out all the sweet potato that was underneath the feijoas so I can make sure I can harvest all of them and there's none sitting around under there because I don't want any fruit rotting in the garden with fruit fly about. It's really important that everything gets harvested as soon as possible. So this is the last of the harvest pretty much for these two feijoa trees. I still have two in the front that are covered in fruit and now that these ones are finished I'm going to be tackling pruning them. But before we do that we are hitting peak week for the guava tree. It is loaded. I really really need to harvest all of them pretty much, well as much of them as I can. And then I'm also going to be pruning the guava so that I can get it small enough to net next year because I do need to net most of my fruit trees now for fruit fly and this one has just gotten so big. We've got two more pomegranates hiding in the back there that have split open and are ready. They smell like lollies.