The Kitchen Garden...

There is an existing fenced vegetable patch not far from the house, about 8x12 metres, completely overgrown with weeds.

The first gardening task is to get it up and running as a kitchen garden with herbs and whatever vegetables I can plant in winter.

I have spent a few hours over a couple of days digging out the weeds with a mattock. It's pretty hard going for someone whose body has not been conditioned to heavy manual labour, but we're getting there....

A bit of a mess to begin with, that's the passionfruit vine along the north fence.

 The first few hours clearing uncovered trellises, a couple of drums for water and garden bed outlines...

The next lot of clearing, it's starting to look like something you might recognise as a garden bed. We planted 5 small rows of garlic in the northeast corner, we'll see how it goes, they might have been put in a bit late.

Even after all this, it might be a bit too shaded to grow vegetables, there are a some large gum trees which block the sun in the afternoon.

Like everything else here it will be a bit of an experiment at first!

Selling fruit

I have a ridiculous amount to learn about gardening and cannot even identify all of the fruit trees as it is almost winter and a lot of them are pretty bare, but so far this is what we know we have:

- Figs
- Granny Smith Apples
- Walnuts
- Hazelnuts
- Grapefruit
- Several types of Lemons
- Cumquats
- Mandarins
- Oranges
- Feijoas
- Kiwifruit
- Passionfruit (the regular Purple and an interesting variety with a soft orange skin and deep red pulp around the pips inside that Wiki thinks is Passiflora caerulea)

There are many others and I suspect we may also have:

- Peaches
- Nectarines
- Apricots
- Another variety of Apple
- Cherries
- Plums

I have called around trying to find someone who knowledgeable about fruit trees and is willing to provide a consultation, to identify what we have, to see what needs work (pruning/removal/grafting) and to teach me how to do all this. 

So far I have managed to line up a local tree expert, Leigh Stone, who is coming next week to see what we can do in the orchard.

We have been here for 3 weeks and have made a bit of progress. The first week I asked the local organic shop if they would be interested in purchasing our fruit for sale and to my delight they said yes, so we dropped off Granny Smith Apples, Grapefruit, Oranges, Lemons and Cumquats. About 2kg of each, which we had carefully picked, individually washed and packed. This earned us about $50 which I took to Heronswood and used to purchase MycoGold and Rockdust to prep the vegetable beds, a book to teach me about gardening, a moon planting calendar and a few freebie plants and seeds because I spent so much, including rhubarb, Algerian oaks and an old-fashioned rose. Needless to say I spent slightly more than our profits, but all in a good cause :)

I was wondering whether the shop would need/want any more of our fruit when I called on Friday to see how it had sold and happily, they wanted everything again and this time about 3 kg of each!

On Saturday, we were showing some friends who had come over for lunch the orchard and there were plenty of apples on the Granny Smith tree, but when I came to pick the fruit on Sunday the tree was almost bare! There were 4 apples left and one that looked a bit chewed. We were seriously perplexed, we couldn't imagine any person could have done this, not without a ladder at any rate. Everyone had told us that the birds would get the fruit if it wasn't netted and lo and behold, my husband found chewed bits of apple on the roof of the tank shed near the tree. And then we remembered how many king parrots we had seen that morning....

So they got a meal and we got a lesson...NET the fruit trees!

They had also had a good nibble at the unripe kiwifruit and feijoas, so after we dropped off our second lot of beautiful fruit to the local organic/health food shop, (oranges, lemons, grapefruit, cumquats and passionfruit), we headed to the local nursery and bought bird netting with the proceeds. 

We had a hilarious time trying to get a 4x4 net and two 4x5 nets over the kiwi fruit vine and feijoa tree. The kiwifruit vine is about 3 metres tall, about the same wide and incredibly easy to get nets tangled in, I had to give it a bit of a prune before we could even attempt to net it. Then we only managed it by loosely tying a corner of the net each to large poles to lift it up and over the plants, all the while my daughter was running amok with the secateurs, fun and games. 

The feijoa tree was easier but the net wasn't nearly big enough, so I had to peg it around the bottom as best I could and hope that this deters the birds.

We will have to wait and see...

Hapley Park

Home-grown organic fruit and veg here we come!

We are finally in the new place! A cosy 3 bedroom cottage on 11.5 acres in the beautiful South Gippsland hills! We have decided to call it Hapley Park and have envisioned using 2-3 acres for organic fruit and veg, 2-3 acres for a park around the house and formal gardens and the rest will become a small vineyard in time. There will also be an area dedicated to bee hives, a large chicken shed and hopefully we will be able to build a small cottage on the separate 2/3rds of an acre title for farmstays. 

That's the plan and though we don't have mountains of cash, we have plenty of time and energy to do it.

We're not starting from scratch though. Already on the property is the lovely house, which doesn't need any work, 5 water tanks (3x10,000 litre Poly tanks, a massive 30,000 litre concrete tank which is cracked and leaking and will cost about $3,500 to repair, and a small 3,000 corrugated iron tank in the orchard). There is also a dam at the bottom of one of the paddocks but the neighbour tells us it has never held water, so that will need attention before we can use it.

There is an orchard of 25 fruit and nut trees, another 10 or so dotted around the house and park and several fruit vines, none of which have had any attention in about 3 years. There is a veggie patch which is completely overgrown with weeds and I'm not sure it even gets enough light to grow vegetables. There is also a lovely garden including a park area with lots of 20-30 year old European deciduous trees, which look just beautiful right now with their autumn foliage. 

There are things that need changing though, the trees and shrubs in the park have been planted in neat rows, which is not particularly appealing visually and doesn't make the space very usable, so at some stage we will look to re-position a couple of these to open it up in the middle a bit.

There are also lots of plants around the house, too close, that are too large, camellias, rhododendrons and azaleas mainly, with some miniature and full size rose bushes that never get enough sun. These will be moved to create a formal garden at the front of the house in the future.

As I mentioned, there is also a 2nd title of about 2/3rds of an acre at the far south of the property. At the moment there is a small stockyard there, but as we don't ever intend to keep significant numbers of stock, I would like to remove this and replace it with a small cottage (adobe, cob, straw-bale or mud-brick) for luxury farm-stay holidays.

There is a double garage with a concrete floor, brilliant work bench and power, which will be perfect for my furniture restoration, and a large hay shed that my husband has plans of turning into a blacksmithing studio.

We are so incredibly excited and looking forward to our organic adventure!