Choko

 

This is one super productive plant.

It's around 15 years old now and the vines reached around 10 meters long after I harvested heaps for mulch on top of collecting tips for greens. How's that for biomass? I gathered the vines today for a final mulching session before they die back with the frost.

We have been eating the fruit for over a month now and add them to lots of curries and stews. They are also great fried, roasted, pickled, with rhubarb in a crumble and you can eat them raw.

As a plant they create the most wonderful deep shade over summer and then die down with the first frost. Dropping all of their fruit for collection.

My sheep love to eat leaves and vines and the chooks and pigs eat any surplus fruit. This year we had half a trailer load!!

Rasins?

 

Raisin trees are a great easy care tree.

The raisins are the very sweet swollen base of the flower stalks. Sweet and crunchy.

These trees self prune, are an amazing bee tree (buzzingly so), creates beautiful shade, fast growing, deciduous and can cope with dry.

Am propagating more this year to spread amongst my chestnut and avocado orchards.

Winter tea

 Lemon verbena is an amazing addition to a cold or how brew. 

Before the frosts I harvest, bunch and hang. All winter long a few leaves can be added to teas.

I grow lemon verbena with citrus, other deciduous trees and with rhubarb, comfrey, mallow, berries....

Planting, planting, planting.

 

And another round.

Native broom, bottlebrush, wattle, and hebe as in photos.

Then rice bush, brunia, poplar, tagasaste (always) cardoon, jacaranda......and loads of perennial flowersand herbs.

So grateful to everyone who has brought flowers and foliage and has contributed.

Bamboo

It's not just  me that loves hanging out in the shady bamboo understory.

The violet patch is thriving...........and I found evidence of some one making potions.

This is one of my timber bamboo groves. As I harvest every year there is  room to move, play, set up hammocks... 

Out of the sun, next to the stream, rustling leaves... what more would you want?

Hedegrow update

 Eucalyptus doing well.

Mulched around them today.

Then planted around 50 understory plants -Hebe, caprosma, tagasaste, rose geranium....

Proudly all propagated by me. It feels so great to be able to raid the nursery and deliver wheelbarrow loads of plants around the property.

Flower delivery

All bunched up and ready to go!!!

This is my car every Wednesday evening as I deliver fresh flower bunches to Cafe Coco.

Mixing it up

 Nothing like a good guild of plants.

Sunflower seedlings on left where planted into a cover crop blend of seeds (peas, lupins, spinach, oats, crimson clover, wheat, buckwheat...) The sunflowers provide shade and then when harvested the cover crop grows until I'm ready to plant the next crop. Diversity of food, height, roots....

And well the flowers on the right are just a riot. All taking up different spaces and places. Shadign and feeding the insect life and soil in their own unique ways. Loving the purple millet and am going to save so much seed this year.

Buckets of learning

  

Its not just learning how to grow new things, but learning how to pick and process and how much you get from everything.

Am getting buckets of flowers and have so many bees.