OrganicGirl1's Edible Backyard

Joined: 19/08/09 Updated: 19/08/09 Frost:
Location: Milford

About My Edible Backyard

Why OrganicGirl1 Love's Edible Plants

We live on organic 160-acre farm near Boonah in south-east Queensland. Since moving here early 2008, we have spent much time researching the best approach to caring for our property and learning about permaculture. For generations this land had been overgrazed, so we have completely de-stocked to allow species to regenerate and ground-cover to thicken once more. It is "scrub" country, consisting of about 1/3 protected dry-rain forest and koala forest (we saw our first one a few weeks ago). The remainder is hilly grazing country - with an annual rainfall between 600-1000mm.

Our orchard is in its infancy, with lemons, dwarf mulberries, burdikin plums, passion fruit , banans and olives at this stage. But that will change in the next few weeks, as we plant the beginings of a fruit forest.

We run a productive vegetable garden which supplies all our greens (boy choy, pac choy, swiss chard, black kale, red kale, normal kale, oak leaf lettuce, miners lettuce, celery, fat hen) herbs (thyme, corriander, basil, rosemary) tomatoes (from compost!) capsicum, sweet potatoes, normal potatoes, onions, garlic etc. We're raw foodists, so find growing our own greens is the only way to affordably keep up with demand for fresh organic greens. And once you have eaten young kale, there is no way you could go back to buying greens again - even if you can find kale in the shops! Can't wait until we begin to get decent amounts of fruit too.

Our biggest challenge at first was water. We only had a 1500-l tank for ourselves and the garden! But, once we worked out the logic of a syphon-feed from our top dam, the drought was broken. Last summer we did also have a problem with fruit-fly and blight in the tomatoes ... hopefully we'll get on top of it this summer .. and grass hoppers.

We operate organically, using our own compost, chook and cow manures and are in the process of learning about biodynamics too.