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.

Our ambition is to create several food forests on our property in time, and this spot between our raised garden beds and our bath house is just the first experiment. Mark is always researching which plants we should introduce and learning from what other people are doing.

In the cool of the morning, we planted bana grass, tithonia, sugar cane and Japanese Raisin trees in amongst the existing comfrey, arrowroot, tree lucerne and fruit trees. These plants will provide shade as they grow and help enrich the soil. It was interesting to observe how different the soil is already compared to when we planted our first fruit trees in that spot.

When we first planted citrus trees in this spot in March 2020, we had no irrigation system and not a lot of water to spare. The area was covered in kikuyu grass and digging the holes for our citrus trees revealed that there wasn’t a lot of topsoil underneath. No more than a few centimetres before the shovel hit clay.

We used to catch the water from our washing machine in buckets and use that to water the trees. On the advice of a clever friend, we used a piece of pipe to deliver the water directly to the tree’s roots to prevent most of it from just running off.

Some of those trees are still part of our food forest, others we lost in the wind damage from last year’s cyclone.

I can’t wait to see what the plants look like, and what we’re eating from our food forest this time next year.