Our Suburban Fruit Tree Tour - What We're Growing So Far.

Welcome to Mackay's Micro Homestead, where Jarrod and Denny sharing our journey of growing and catching food, raising back our chickens and building a more self-sufficient life on our one-fifth of an acre, 800 metre squared suburban block. The sun has finally come back out. We've had a really wet start to the week. I can't complain about the rain because we are on rainwater here, so we're not connected to town water at all. We're still right on the edge of a major city, but being an older suburb, we're still on town water. We've been waiting for the rain to clear so that we would be able to do a bit of much-needed winter pruning of our fruit trees before spring. Fruit trees were definitely one of the first things we wanted to get in the ground. We've planted over 20 different varieties over the past five years. But we'll start right back at the beginning with our very first tree. So this is our Bowen mango tree, and it was the very first tree we planted. The poor little thing has been moved twice. It started its life over in the far corner over here, and then when we decided we wanted to plant bananas, then we moved it over to about here, just here. And then, of course, once I decided on putting some veggie garden beds in, it was off-centre, and so then we decided that it could be moved into this main strip here, which is our little fruit salad garden. And then the next thing to go in were the ladyfinger bananas. They definitely need a bit of a haircut. I think I've been saying that for weeks. One of my favourite things is sitting up on our balcony and watching the honey eaters, the blue-faced honey eaters. They love the nectar from the bananas once they flower. And then we were pretty much hooked. We had a truck deliver a load of soil from a local landscape yard, and so Jared built some garden edging all the way along here, where we could start planting our fruit trees, and we have sweet potato as the ground cover, and we kind of harvest that once a year, but then also do a bit of bandicooting. You just sort of dig through and see what you can find if you need a sweet potato for dinner. We planted three feijoas. We are originally from New Zealand, so feijoas do taste a bit like home, and my father-in-law has the absolute best feijoa hedge on his driveway, and so even though mine's just a little mini one with just the three, it's already started to be quite productive. And this sad-looking pile of sticks is actually a black genoa fig. I love figs. So far, we've had one fig. I think it's been planted for a couple of years, and we've kind of tried to do it in a bit of a bush format. It is dormant at the moment, but I can see just a few new little leaf buds starting to form. And this one here is a red papaya. Its leaves really seem to struggle this time of the year, and I couldn't help myself, but I already started trimming this one back just to get rid of some of this. It looks perhaps diseased or a fungus. I'm not quite sure what's causing that. And of course, our apple trees. So we ordered two different varieties. So my two apple trees have been delivered today from Fruitopia. So we've got a couple of different varieties that we can cross-pollinate. We've got the golden dorset apple. I think I can just buy some little baby apples on that one already. Oh my goodness, that's the cutest little thing. And then we've also got the tropic sweet. That is going to be yummy. This one here is the tropic sweet, and it has low chill hours, which is necessary when you live in the subtropics. And then this one here is the golden dorset, which has even lower chill hours. But they're both very sweet varieties, and you just need the two different varieties to be able to cross-pollinate. And make sure you check which varieties will be suitable for cross-pollination, because not all will cross-pollinate with one another. And that makes me very happy to see a few little ants. Hopefully they're doing the pollinating job, since we haven't got many bees in the garden at the moment. A second red papaya, and then our pomegranate, which is just starting to form some buds, and again definitely needs a haircut. I don't think if I could go back that I would plant it in this location, because they have the biggest spikes right on our driveway, so if you do happen to get out of the car and I haven't cut it back, you may get a snack. And we have a sneaky pomegranate that seems to have made it past the last harvest. We might as well grab him now. This sad-looking stump is actually a moringa, which we've cut right back. We actually freeze the leaves, we make moringa tea, and we have another little feijoa down this end. I'm not sure how well it's going to go here. It doesn't get as much light, and it's away from its little friends down the other end, but that was the only spot for it when we got it. We actually rescued that one from someone who couldn't keep it anymore, and they only had the one, so we've decided to pop it in the garden and see how it goes. This lychee was another one that came to us a little unexpectedly. It didn't have the greatest start, so it is a little bit wobbly, but we're trying to sort of straighten it up a bit. And this little guy here is a super dwarf Cavendish banana. A lovely local lady, she gave it to me for free. Well, I ended up trading it for some eggs, but she was willing to give it to me for free, which was so kind of her. So I'm really excited to see how they go. I've never grown a super dwarf variety before. And this one here is probably the one I really have kind of babied the most. It's a Golden Malay coconut, and it should only grow to be about two and a half to three metres tall. Hopefully that's suitable for our little front yard and allows us to still be able to harvest them, because coconut trees can get very, very tall. Soursop came from my sister, and I believe she got it from a friend of hers who has an orchard with a whole heap of different tropical varieties. And moving along, we've seen our little mango. And here we've got a Sundowner nectarine, which just keeps putting out more and more beautiful blooms. Oh, those ones look like they're actually starting to form fruit. And I absolutely love our Hawaiian guava. However, it's probably been the one that's given me the most headaches because of the Queensland fruit fly. You just get an abundance of fruit on that every year. But we really have only got to eat the smallest amount. I have tried bagging it. I've tried netting it. Nothing has worked so far. So this is a yellow papaya. It's taken a lot longer to get going than the red ones. I think just height-wise they need to get past some undergrowth. And our little passion fruit vine is still the gift that keeps on giving. And this is our wee banana grove. It's a little worse for wear, but it was so pretty when we first put it together. At the back we have the blue java bananas. And we almost got fruit off those ones. Unfortunately, it got really battered during Cyclone Alfred. It didn't fall down during the cyclone, but the plant eventually just died and they stopped ripening. So it had to be cut down. And the red dacca bananas have definitely taken a beating over this past weekend. The leaves are so shredded. And our Passang Cylon bananas, they had to be harvested early this year. Despite that, they actually ended up being quite delicious once they finally ripened. And down this side of the house is our little citrus alley. We have mandarin, lime and lemon. And all three of these trees were already here when we moved in. We hope you enjoyed watching. We were up to with our fruit trees on our 800m2 suburban block.