Last week we got another exciting delivery of plants for our burgeoning food forest from our friends at Twin Falls Nursery. Amongst them were six lady finger banana corms (they look a bit like pork knuckles), the part of the plant that produces offshoots that will become our first banana palms.

I’m getting so used to treating our garden like a supermarket, sometimes I forget how many failures we’ve had on our journey learning to grow our own food. There’s been so many hard lessons, we’ve had issues with soil quality, wind, pests, too much water, not enough water.

I’ve fallen in love with courgettes this season. Thankfully ours are growing well this year since we gave each plant a stake to climb. Last year we had several plants in our garden, but I feel like I wasted them. I’d regularly forget to go and check for fruit under the huge, spikey zucchini leaves.

Sustainable fabric grow bags are one of the easiest ways to create more growing space.

While our property has lots of space for us to turn into growing areas, it can be a bit of effort to set up new spaces. We experimented with planting rambling crops like potatoes, kūmara and pumpkins on a mulched bank but found that they struggled in poor quality clay soil that lacked nutrients and couldn’t hold moisture.

This weekend we spent a lot of time in our food forest: weeding, planting, playing and even eating. It’s early days in our syntropic gardening journey but we’re already reaping the rewards. All the hard work was worth it to hear our daughter proudly proclaim that we were having a feast when she sat down to eat blueberries and raspberries from the food forest.

Learning is one of Mark’s superpowers, he can consume, understand and apply large volumes of information about a range of topics. This has been a huge asset for us as we’ve developed our land and our home.

Last year, he focused on syntropic gardening – a method of cultivation that aligns closely with the natural processes and symbiotic relationships found in ecosystems.

Our kids eat all the strawberries we grow as soon as they’re ripe. A lot of them don’t even get the chance to ripen before they’re plucked by hungry little fingers.

The good news? You only need four strawberries for this delicious daiquiri recipe. Our kids had a sleepover at their nana’s this week, which gave me an opportunity to swipe a handful for frozen strawberry daiquiris.

Starting a veggie garden was something we’d always planned to do at some point, but the question of access to fresh food was top of mind at the start of the pandemic, so as soon as we could buy plants, we got planting.