Inspiring Food Forest Tour - Turning a Grass Paddock into an Edible Oasis!

Kia ora, welcome back to the food forest and I know it's been ages since I've given you guys an update on what's happening here and there's been so much growth since the last update so I'm really excited to show you around, show you some of the new fruit trees, the different things that are fruiting at the moment and some of the other stuff that's happening here on the property. So come with me and we'll take a look at the food forest to start with. One thing that draws people into this area the most at this time of year is these cardoon plants and these are really high, they're probably 9 feet tall, I'm standing on a chair right now and they are bursting right now with these amazing flowers and they're a relation of an artichoke. So I have some artichokes growing here as well which I've left some to flower and the bees are absolutely loving them as well and they just create such an amazing structure in the garden, such a talking point and an area of interest. But I will make a full video about these cardoons because there is a lot to like about them, a lot to use them for and good reasons to grow them so yeah, wait for that video but for now I'm just appreciating the beauty that these plants have and the structure and interest that they bring to the garden. I'm really pleased with the layout of the food forest because basically what we did was create different shaped islands that had grass paths in between and nothing is really a straight line, they kind of curve around and lead you to different areas of the food forest making it a bit more of a journey of wonder and discovery as you move through the different parts and it means you can't see every area of the food forest from one spot and as you work your way through you kind of come across things that you didn't know were there, little plants that were kind of hidden in a little nook or cranny and it just makes the experience feel a lot more natural and interesting and engaging, at least for me anyway. I really like having a diverse herb layer in the food forest because not only is it good for insects and diversity and it looks beautiful and it fills in spaces but when I walk around I often like pick pieces of herbs and just crush them up in my hands and when you smell it it just almost brings like a whole other level to the experience of being in the garden so do try that and really smell them deeply, it just makes you feel more alive. But another cool thing that I want to do is make some dry tea from these so I'm harvesting some pineapple sage, some orange balm, some raspberry leaf as well that can be quite good for tea, this lemon verbena is also very nice plus some calendula petals and some pansies. You can just let these air dry but I'm putting them in a dehydrator to speed it up and then once it's all dry I'm just going to layer it into some jars and it not only looks cool but it means you get a bit of everything when you take a scoop and it makes a pretty nice looking gift as well. I've also been chopping and dropping some of the support species which I've planted, this involves cutting or pruning plants and leaving the organic matter on the ground as mulch. So as this organic material breaks down it adds valuable nutrients back into the soil creating a nutrient rich layer that benefits the surrounding plants. This basically mimics the natural processes in a forest where leaves and plant material fall to the ground, decompose and enrich the soil. This plant here is called comfrey and they've got really deep roots that draw up nutrients from deep in the soil and pull them up into the leaves and so if you cut the leaves and drop them on the ground, as they break down they can feed the other trees around. So this looks kind of harsh but you can basically just go like that and you get all this plant material here which you can then lay on the ground and this plant is very resilient, you won't kill it from doing this, it will grow back in literally a matter of weeks especially when the weather is warmer. It's a really simple yet powerful way to care for the soil, promote biodiversity and create a more resilient and self-sustaining environment in your garden. For any of you gardeners out there you'll know how therapeutic it can be spending time out in your garden. It's like your own little slice of peace right in your backyard but let's be real, life can often throw unique challenges our way that require more than just spending time outside. So I wanted just to take a moment to talk about mental health before we get into discovering the rest of the food forest because this is something that I think deserves just as much attention. Personally I've found that looking after my mental health is so important because it really does affect every other area of your life, kind of like your physical health as well. And so I'm really excited to be talking to you guys about BetterHelp who are sponsoring today's video because therapy is something that has really benefited me and my mental health and I think that a lot of people could benefit from it. In case you hadn't heard, BetterHelp is an online therapy platform and it's super simple to get started. All you have to do is answer a few questions about yourself on their website and then BetterHelp will match you with a licensed professional therapist based on your needs and preferences. And because they've got over 30,000 therapists in their network, it gives you access to a much wider range of expertise than you'd likely find in your local area. And once you've been matched with your therapist you can start communicating with them however you feel most comfortable, whether that's via phone call, video chat, or even messaging, whatever's best for you. And if for some reason the therapist that you're matched with doesn't feel like the right fit for you, that's totally fine, it's easy and free to switch to a new one. We spend a lot of time and energy looking after and enriching our gardens, so why not do the same for our minds? So if you think you might benefit from therapy, please consider BetterHelp, and if you use my link below you'll be supporting this channel, but it will also give you 10% off your first month. Visit betterhelp.com slash thekiwigrower and I really hope it helps you to live a happier and healthier life. Check out this beautiful tree, it is a Rainbow Valley Pawpaw, or papaya, and it's a cross between a babaka and a mountain pawpaw I believe. And you can see that it's got all these fruits on it, and this is only a small amount compared to what has been on it over the last few months, because they were spanning about double this distance, or even triple, all the way down the trunk here. So they tend to harvest themselves, they fall off when they're ready, and I've been getting around maybe five or so a week, so like every day or two there'll be one or two that falls off. And if you look further up you can see that there are more flowers forming as well, so those will also turn into more fruit, which is amazing. And it's been great to see that these subtropical type trees have been successful here. And part of the reason is because I've got this big lucerne tree that's been growing above it, providing frost protection, shade, and a bit of wind protection too. So it's loving it down here in the understory as it starts to mature. You can eat these skin and all, I often will just peel a very thin layer of the skin off to eat them, but I'll just try it like this. It is really juicy and tasty, and rather than other papayas where they're more of that sort of buttery, creamy texture, this is more of a juicy, fleshy sort of texture, and it has a mild sweet taste, but it's really refreshing and nice that it has these two textures of the outside fleshy, juicy part, and then the middle, which is this more fluffy but still juicy area with the seeds. It's really cool. Speaking of papaya, this right here is an oak-leaved papaya. It's way taller than me, and it's a deciduous type, so it loses its leaves in winter, and it can handle frost quite well. And what's cool is it's covered in flowers right now. And I've got another tree nearby to help with pollination, so fingers crossed we get some fruits off this this year. While we're on the topic of subtropical plants, these here are tamariyos. You can see there's a bunch of them along here, and I planted these only a year ago at about this height, so they're taller than me now, they've grown really quickly, and there's a bunch of flowers and fruits all over these, so they're doing really well. I planted them here because there's protection from the house from the prevailing winds that we get, and these really don't like wind and they don't like frost. Previously, these would never have survived over in the other area where the food forest is now, but what's really cool is as the food forest is getting bigger, it's creating a microclimate, some of the trees are providing some shelter from above, and so I have been able to plant a few tamariyo trees over there, which is great because they can be in amongst the food forest, thriving in that understory, and protected somewhat from wind and frost, and still produce some fruits. So that's been really awesome to see. This is really exciting. You might remember a little while ago I made a video on how to grow peach trees from seed, and this was the one that I planted in that video, so it's only two and a half years since I first put that seed in the ground to get it to what it is today. And what's really cool is that it actually has three peaches growing on it, so I'm really excited about that. They'll be ripe in a few months' time, and it's just so cool that in such a short amount of time, only two and a half years, you can take something from a seed to then producing your own fruits. And I would say by next year there should be quite a few more on this tree, so it's definitely worth learning how to do and growing your own peach trees from seed, especially if you can get your hands on a heritage variety. This is one of the new additions to the garden, and I've actually had this in a while, but I'm excited to show you this finally. It is a red Szechuan pepper tree, and if you look closely, it has these really gnarly spikes all up the trunk and up the branches of the tree, but it has also these very beautiful leaves and these little berries on it, or little peppercorns kind of, but they're actually a member of the citrus family, and when these are ripe they turn kind of a reddish, pinkish colour. What's really crazy about these is if you pop them in your mouth, the sensation is absolutely wild. The flavour starts out slightly mild, and then it just like starts building and building and more flavours and sensations come in, your mouth starts kind of buzzing and salivating and almost frothing, and you get this very sort of distinct citrusy explosion with other numbing feelings and things like that. It's quite a bizarre thing to eat, and you can add it to different cuisines to add that very distinct kind of citrusy note, with also that numbing sensation. When I pruned this in the winter, when it had no leaves, I made sure that all of the prunings that I took off it, I put in a really safe spot, because those spikes are really insane. But I went back to that pile recently and took some of the cuttings and I actually taped it onto the trunk of one of my apple trees, because I had possums coming in and eating the leaves and starting to eat the unripe apples off the tree. So I'm hoping this will be a little bit of a deterrent from those possums from climbing the tree, so we'll see if that works. Some of the new additions to the garden include this myoga ginger, as well as red pineapples, two different types of banana trees. These ones are blue java bananas, so I'm pretty excited about those. I've also got some tropical apricot trees, which produce a very sour little fruit, but they're pretty cool. This is a yuvala, and it's native to Brazil, and it produces a beautiful orange fruit. And my Chinese quince flowered for the first time this year, and it's got some fruits on it. This tree was grown from seed, so I'm really interested to see how they'll turn out. So I'll share more about those in the future, as well as some of the other new things around the garden that I won't quite get to today. Well it turns out the spikes on the apple tree did make the possum avoid climbing it, but instead he has eaten my nectarines. So as you can see there is big chew marks there, so I'm not going to waste these, I'll still cut the bad bits off, and wash them and eat them. But as you can see there's a bunch of these early nectarines on here, so we'll go through now and harvest them, before he comes back tonight and eats the rest. Honestly I don't blame the possum for eating these, these are so sweet and so delicious. So along this fence line here, which is next to my veggie gardens, I've made an in-ground garden which is mostly filled with edible plants. So basically what I've got is a blueberry plant, around every two metres all the way along here, and then in between those I have Chilean guava bushes, which are flowering at the moment and starting to produce lots of fruit, which is great to see. I've also made a ground cover layer made out of white strawberries and different herbs like thyme, marjoram, oregano, things like that. This plant here is called a hot and spicy oregano, I saw it and I had to have it. And it actually is very spicy, so when you chew on it, it's like eating a mixture of oregano with a chilli pepper. It's definitely hot and spicy oregano, that's a good name for it. In the mix as well you'll also see these big tall plants, these are celery and silverbeet all along, in between as well. These have been in for two years and I've gotten so much food off those plants as they've just been there the whole time, giving off so many leaves and celery stalks, but they're now finally going to seed, so they're coming to the end of their life, but I'll be able to put in more of those as well. I've also got some annual veggies that I decided to pop in here, I've got some red cabbages, kale, a bit of broccoli, lettuces and a bunch of spring onions as well. And then a few other perennials like red-veined sorrel, lovage, a fig tree, a limequat tree and purple asparagus. It's also been just a nice area where I can feed the sheep and the turkeys because they really like the silverbeet. I do want to get a lot more flowering things in here, I do have a few, but it does need a bit more colour, so that'll be the next thing. But yeah, I wanted to show you this because it's amazing how much food and edible plants that you can pack into a single space, and not only that, it brings in pollinators and provides habitats for insects, which is great for being right next to the veggie garden. I really like this area too, where I've got a mixture of food forest as well as some in-ground garden beds where I can plant things like root crops and annual vegetables and perennial vegetables where I don't want trees' roots from above to kind of impede on their growth and have to be affected when I harvest root vegetables like potatoes. So over here I've got this variegated lemon tree, a limequat tree there which is another type of citrus, outer flower, a fig tree, and then a lemonade tree at that end. And then there's things like this lavender here, three big rhubarbs which are really prolific. And then the area where I've got some in-ground beds, we've got some leeks, some silverbeet, some New Zealand yams, and I've planted some potatoes there as well which haven't quite come up yet. So around the back there's also some room for some in-ground beds, so there's some black popcorn planted there and some pumpkins. So a lot of diversity, a lot of range of things in this garden, and it's quite good to be able to have this sort of area that's very protected from the trees around it but isn't being affected by shading it out too much because a lot of these plants do like a lot of sun. Some of you might remember these eucalyptus trees or these gum trees that we planted when they were only very small, and they're now towering way over me to the point where if I wanted to I could climb them. And it's really cool to see that the growth spurts they get now, they suddenly increase by half a metre to a metre in a very short amount of time. And it's so awesome to have these because they're starting to produce some more shade for the sheep, as well as some more wind protection for the property, and giving us more privacy from neighbours. So it's worked out really well. As well as that, the native tree areas are doing really well also, they're starting to pump out the growth as well, and we're even starting to see some more native birds turn up, which is amazing because there's really very few native trees in this area. So to see those birds starting to come back is really rewarding, and I aim to be planting more and more native trees every winter to look after the land, make it more resilient, and hopefully bring back some of that native wildlife. As we're heading into summer and it's starting to dry out a bit, the paddocks are going to seed, but the turkeys are actually loving stripping the seed heads off the plants and getting all that extra food, so that's pretty awesome to see. But I'm hoping that it's not going to be too crazy of a drought this summer, where we end up having very very dry paddocks, so we'll see what happens. I wanted to say a big thank you to all you guys who have supported my channel this year through watching and liking and commenting on my videos. All that kind of thing really helps me to continue putting out more videos for you guys, and yeah, so appreciated. Also a big thank you to BetterHelp, and I really hope you guys have an awesome rest of your year, and I look forward to seeing you guys again very soon. Alright, we'll catch you later.