Growing fruit salad for breakfast

Breakfast this morning. It’s a bit astounding, and very exciting, that just three years into this retrosuburbia challenge, I can eat a breakfast of yoghurt and fresh fruit salad most mornings if I want to – apple and plumcot and mulberries last month, passionfruit and blueberries and dragonfruit next month, citrus by winter, and next year there will be feijoas and figs, pears and cherries, custard apples and carambolas. I don’t think we ever really got to that point even with unlimited space in nearly 40 years of rural permaculture, not the consistent, year round variety (and almost never bananas).

So what’s the go? What can I credit with such bounty?

The easy first answer is wildlife. I wrote about the challenge of combining real food production with wildlife habitat restoration in a rural environment, back in one of the first posts on this site – A Short Lesson In Exponential Growth. I still think it’s a challenge that many back-to-the-land permaculture enthusiasts underestimate. It puts ethical vegans, in particular, in a real moral conundrum. You get away with it for a while, only because generations before have so thoroughly decimated the wildlife. But then you find out, somewhat brutally, why they did.

The wildlife in suburbia is much more manageable. We’re keeping fruit trees small and netting them to protect from parrots and fruit fly but we haven’t had to contend with wallabies ringbarking the trees. or possums eating all the flowers before they’re even pollinated, or having to bag bananas with wire so the turkeys don’t just swipe off the bag, (with elaborate contraptions to hold the wire far enough off the bunch that they can’t just peck through the it). There is a good argument that the best thing you can do for wildlife is to concentrate humans, and their gardens, in urban and suburban settlements. There’s a famous Bill Mollison quote from the Designer’s Manual:

“When we settle into wilderness, we are in conflict with so many life forms that we have to destroy them to exist. Keep out of the bush. It is already in good order.”

But what else?

It’s no one thing, just a combination of small actions, none of them so very difficult or expensive. Just, when you do them all together, they light up each other and the whole thing just works.

Design. We have much more consciously designed this place, with attention to climate, rainfall and drainage, zones and sectors and sun path and aspect. Not hard to do, and it makes a huge difference having trees selected and placed so that they’re living their best life.

$350 dollar holes. There’s the old adage that “it’s better to put a $1 plant in a $10 hole than a $10 plant in a $1 hole”. We wanted to get this challenge off to a fast start so we bought trees (rather than propagating), and with grafted fruit trees costing around $35 or more, if we’d followed the adage, a $350 hole for each tree wouldn’t have been wasted. We didn’t get anywhere near that, but it just shows how big the gap is. Our Council makes compost from the green waste bin though, and it’s cheap. We bought ten tonnes of it.

Food forest not orchard. The initial planting using that ten tonnes was not just fruit trees dotted around a lawn, but a complete cover including ground covers and understory plants, and nursery trees. We propagated a lot of tamarillos as nursery trees and it was a bit of a gamble that they were the right choice – selecting the right nursery trees for the site is one of those critical jenga bits, and it will be different for every site. Tamarillos are a subtropical, very fast growing, short lived, small tree with a nice growth pattern of a central trunk and spreading canopy. Within a few months they had shaded the ground and created a sheltered microclimate for our expensive bought trees. Last year we got a big crop from them. This year, we’ve pruned them heavily to allow more light through, using the prunings as chop and drop mulch. Next year we’ll do the same and the following year they should be finished and the bought trees big enough to need pruning themselves.

Fertilizing. A couple of times a year, we topdress with our home-made chook compost, giving each tree a couple of shovelfulls. Every few months, each tree gets half a bucket or so of diluted seaweed brew, and if they are looking at all deficient in anything they get a bucket of diluted leachate from the worm farm with a handful of worm castings added. It’s not a huge amount but I have to admit we did rarely actually feed our trees in our rural homestead, and it makes a real difference.

Water. We’re lucky here. Annual rainfall is around 1600mm, and the driest time is in winter and early spring. We have a soaker hose from our rainwater tank laid out, and if it doesn’t rain for a few weeks, we turn it on and empty 4000 litres onto the planted area over the period of a week or so. It’s really only early spring that needs it, but for the trees being able to concentrate on growing and fruiting, rather than conserving moisture or recovering makes a big difference.

Bees. Do the bees make a difference? It’s hard to know, but with the varroa mite invasion, there’s lots in the news about commercial growers struggling to get good pollination. We don’t use insecticides, or any icides, for anything. To my mind they are always one step forward and two back. The apples and stone fruits so far have needed exclusion netting against fruit fly and codling moth, and no doubt other fruit will too, but with no insecticides, we’re having no trouble with fruit set. And we get honey.

I think that’s it. I can’t think of anything else we are doing different. Here’s to fruit salad.