Garden Visit to Nick's food forest in Repton

Diary Dates

Nick's food forest in Repton

A warm Saturday for us in Repton began a little smokey, but eventually a welcome seabreeze lifted the atmosphere.

Nick started us off with an outline of his garden challenges and endeavours, describing how he manages water collection & dispersal. We saw two stainless steel water tanks and Nick uses a small tank as his first flush diversion. Water from this tank is then used for watering food crops. The garden has definite drier and wetter zones and little watering takes place apart from watering in new plants and utilisation of grey water. An old tank has been converted into a pond that overflows to provide water into the wetter part of the garden.

Having identified the various microclimates, he plants with quick growing top covers & successional understories. Nick starts his shade canopy with weedy plants such as wild tobacco bush and Senna. This is followed by quick growing natives such as bleeding heart and then by the plants from the food forest such as pigeon peas, macadamias and fruiting plants including the yellow jaboticaba which confused many a fruit loving seed saver.

Soil amelioration techniques were also discussed. The grass was smothered with sweet potato which kept the soil covered. Organic matter was then increased by adding chipped tree mulch, and chopping and dropping the plants mentioned previously mentioned. Nick is an avid composter and worm lover.

To finish off, we all trooped back up to the verandah for a well earned lunch.

Thanks to Nick and family for a lovely day

Fruiting on Mid North Coast NSW, late November.

It is always interesting to see what is flowering and fruiting. This has been a very warm but dry winter. The rain arrived two weeks ago.

Immature fruit on a dwarf peach

The Black Sapote flowered with the rain and now has immature fruit.

The Boysenberries are showing the effect of a dry spring. The fruit is small.

There are only two fruit on this Cherimoya.

This bunch of Ladyfinger bananas was cut two weeks ago.

Fruiting Florida Gold plum

Immature fruit and flowers on a Grumichama

Japanese Plum

NSW Davidson Plum

Mature and green Jaboticaba fruit

Protecting the Jaboticaba fruit from birds is essential. This fake hawk works sometimes.

These Tamarillo trees fruited all through winter.

Japanese raisin tree flowers

White Sapote, one protected from birds inside a plastic milk container bottle.