Harvesting Groceries From My 1-5 Acre Food Forest (Perth, Australia).

Welcome back to the garden. We're about to get some rain so I need to do a big harvest of all the fruit that's ripe and ready in the food frost. So let's go pick some fruit. This is my negami kumquat and as you can see it is loaded. The branches are just hanging over with all this fruit. Oh it's going to be much quicker just to pick them. They're just about falling off anyway. They smell so good. So these are the negami kumquats and they are sweet on the outside but sour on the inside. They have got a few seeds but the good thing about these is that the whole fruit is edible so we can make jams and chutneys really easily and we don't have to separate them. So there's still a whole lot more on the tree but I picked all the ripest ones first to get started with so we can like make some jam, some chutney, test out a few things while I leave the rest on there. Should hopefully make it through the rainstorm because they're still a little bit yellow, not quite ripe. So in the front yard we have my lemonade which is covered in fruit. I've been harvesting these, I've been eating these but they're starting to fall off the tree. They're not able to hang on much longer and it's already flowering and producing more fruit so I really need to harvest these especially before the rain or they'll all end up split or on the ground and I don't want any of them to go to waste. So if there are any that don't look quite ripe I will leave them because I don't like to do massive harvest baskets like this because it means I have to do something with all the fruit. So if I can leave them on the tree for as long as possible and use them a little bit at a time that is the ultimate goal. It extends the harvest and I don't feel pressured to have to preserve them or make something with them but usually towards the end of the season I do have to do a big harvest and this poor tree is about falling over. The big one, it's got lots of sharp thorns on it which is the downside. Prolific, produces a lot of fruit but definitely one to watch with the thorns. We've got my blood orange and I've only got a few left of these. I've been harvesting these, they're so delicious and you can tell, like that one just fell off, you can tell that they are ready when they start to get this like rusty red color on them. This means that they're going to be nice and red inside. You can see that rusty sort of color compared to the orange and you've got the red. Let's harvest a few radishes and beetroots from the veggie patch. So I've been harvesting a lot of these leaves because you can use beetroot leaves just like you would chard, chopped up in stir fries and soups and curries. So I've been harvesting a lot of them but some of these are definitely getting big and ready to pack. One of the benefits of growing your own food is you not only get access to these delicious root crops grown in your own soil but you also get access to all of these beautiful greens. So these lush leafy greens are not something that you normally get when you purchase beetroot at the supermarket and if you do they're usually limp and gross and not nice and crisp and beautiful like these. All right so down here I've got some radishes that are definitely ready to be picked. Radishes have quite a spiky leaf on them so it is a good idea to wear gloves but we're just going to go straight in. Oh I can feel them. And the same thing with radishes, you can eat all of the leaves on the radish as well as you've just got to cook them down and that helps get rid of some of those spikes. But this one is a black Spanish round radish and because I over seed, I plant seeds everywhere, there's little radishes and little beetroots and little veggies popping up all in between these radishes that now that I harvest these they'll have enough light to pop up and regrow. So although I probably will put some more seeds in, I don't have to. There's definitely things on the way already which is how I get a really good succession of constant food is just by planting a lot of seeds. So there are a few special radishes in here that I am that I'm not going to harvest because I want to be able to save the seeds from those. So those are my black, those are my purple daikon radishes so I'm going to leave those in to go to flower and to seed so I can save the seeds. Oh this one's split and there's like slaters all in the crack. That one's very black. So these are all from seeds that I saved myself so some of them may be a little bit hybridized because I let a lot of things go to flower and seed in the garden and then I save those seeds. They're not always true to type but these ones are looking very much like my black Spanish radishes and then underneath here you can see I've already got some radishes, some some chard here, some more radishes, my pineapple sage which was getting covered with leaf has now got some light and we'll probably pop some more seeds in there as well. Look at all this. So I've got some beetroot and some radish. I've got a few other things that I want to pick as well before we get all the rain. So I've got another big radish in here. This actually looks like it's two radishes joined together. It's got two roots on it. Snail. Look at this one. Monster. Now I've lost my snippers because now I've opened up space we can see all the chilies so there's lots of dry half dead ones on here that all I do is just bury them in the garden. So that's how this one came to be is that I got some old half dead chilies from the back plant out there and just buried them here in the garden and they popped up so it is the easiest way to grow food. Literally just find a spot bury it in the garden. There's so many seeds in a chili and so all we need is one or two to get big enough to grow and those will pop up when the time is right. The seeds know so once the weather starts warming up they'll just pop up and start growing and you might get 20-50 seedlings starting but the strongest and best ones will survive and then you get a prolific plant like this with very little effort and I've never had much success growing chilies from a seed so I started with some little seedlings and now this is how I continue to get lots and lots of chili plants is that I just bury the seeds of the old chilies all around the place and of course they don't all grow they don't all pop up but that's the beauty of having like so much abundance in the garden is that you can literally just be so free with it. Find some space down here all right so I really need to pick all of these chilies we're going to pick these and then we've got more out the back from the mother plant which is the one that I saved buried the seeds from for this one and it's covered in fruit so lots of chilies I'm gonna have to make some chili jam some sweet chili sauce and yeah any of these old half-rotten ones definitely we'll be planting those in other areas of the garden and like even in the food forest this chili plant's crazy it's already pushing lots of more flowers and now that I'm harvesting these fruits from it it will be able to put more energy into other things normally I would give this a big prune back for over a wintering it but our winters here just don't really get that cold and it's looking nice and healthy so all I will do is just prune off some of these limbs that look a little bit sad another job that's been on my list for far too long is to harvest these capsicums someone has already had a go at these and I'm actually just going to prune that whole branch off to give the plant a little bit of a respite but these are actually yellow banana capsicums that have matured to red because I want to save the seeds of these these are one of my favorite capsicums to grow I just find them so much easier than the big bell peppers they they're really sweet they're really mild and these ones are all for seeds so I'll cut these open dry out the seeds this one has already been half the jobs being done for me so you can see all the seeds in there I'm just going to bury this in the garden because why not I mean I've got all these ones here I'm saving but of course my favorite technique is just burying things in the garden so we will see just like that so much easier and I think it's really important to have some of these easy strategies like that because we can't always get to the jobs on time like these banana capsicums here and saving the and these are snapdragon seeds it's a little dried seed pods you can see so these little dried seed pods are full of seeds so all the time I'm just coming out into the garden and instead of saving all of these seeds which I absolutely could do I just scatter them everywhere seed fairy throw them through the garden if they pop up amazing I'll get edible flowers everywhere and if I want to move them I can always pick up the little seedlings and move them about to other areas if there's too many but it's just such a low maintenance easy way to grow food and I actually find so much more success from doing that than saving all these seeds putting them into little seed trays of course my germination rates are not great but like one seed pod this one seed pod probably has a hundred seeds in it so we just throw that through the garden and our chances of success are pretty decent so all these lettuces I've been coming out and harvesting the the sides of them so I don't ever pick a whole lettuce I want my lettuce to be really fresh as I need it like most of my food from the garden I don't do big harvests if I can avoid it at the moment we've got a lot of rain coming so I definitely want to get in and get the ones that are going to spoil but things like lettuces they're going to absolutely love the rain and I'm not going to have limp lettuce sitting in my refrigerator when I could have it fresh from the garden for every meal so I've just harvested a beetroot and now we've got some light into here and there's already little seedlings popping up so I don't actually have to plant any more seeds but of course I will go in and sprinkle a few more seeds in here lots of little things on the under stories just waiting until they get enough light to pop up and grow so these little yellow rainbow chards were getting blocked out by the this beetroot so now they'll get a lot more light down there so this one here is the mother plant the main one that I have planted all around the place for from just burying chilies in the garden and I also have done that here but it's absolutely loaded and it really needs to be harvested because they're starting to dry out on the plant so let's go ahead and pick the rest of these and just like the other one this one is pushing all new growth and new flowers so it's going to be really happy to have these pruned off and then behind me here I have a potted longan and I've got one lucky last longan so I've been harvesting these for a while and it's one left so this I'm keeping in a pot because longans are really vigorous growers this is going to want to be a big big tree and because I want to have as many little grasshopper here you go because I want to try and get as many fruit trees as I can into my small urban food forest I am opting to keep this one in a pot because I'll still get lots of fruit but I won't have to be trying to keep it small when and here we have my big harvest of lemonades mandarins blood orange radish beetroot chilies and one longan but let's cut some of these open and see what they look like inside because some of them have quite the surprise so first up let's find a really good blood orange next up let's cut open one of these beetroots so I've got these beautiful candy cane striped beetroots that are really really sweet I love this variety it's one of my favorite ones to grow then we've got our beautiful blood orange oh it smells so good it's so sweet these are a really juicy variety so really good for making for juicing and we've got our mandarins and actually the mandarin tree was on the list of probably going to get removed and this year actually surprised me I was wondering if it was maybe because I threatened it it's actually been the best tasting mandarins I've had also like no pretty much no fruit fly and yeah really delicious so I've been able to eat these just fresh off the tree cut this one open oh my gosh they smell so good so these are a sweet lemonade you eat them fresh like an orange with a lemon flavor so we've got some delicious lemonades just cut these open so you can see and then the mandarins they're a little bit smaller this year um so I don't know if that's concentrated the flavor and made better what but definitely delicious may not be removing that tree my initial plan was to graft other varieties onto it so I think that might be what I'll do is just keep the tree and stick some other varieties onto it throw the peels in the garden I forgot the kumquats I can't believe I forgot the kumquats anyway we've got this big beautiful bowl of kumquats to make jam and chutneys lemonades mandarins blood orange beetroot radish chilies and longan all harvested from the garden today a little bit of grocery shopping in the garden so if you want to see more from the garden make sure you are subscribed because we have more seeds to plant a few more things to sneak in lots more happenings