Growing Your Own Food


 Pleasure and Patience

It's taken 5 years now to really start producing fruit and I've still a long way to go yet. At least this year I feel I can say I have an orchard AND a vegetable garden. When you start a farm from vacant land the vegetables can come within months of planting your first crop but the fruit trees well they are going to take much longer. I've managed to get lemons now producing well but still the waiting for limes, oranges, mandarines, olives, lychees, mangos, macadamia nuts and more.  Quince, figs, tamarillos, passionfruit and rosellas I've mastered and get great crops from those trees. I guess the thing I've had to learn, which definitely does not come natural to me is patience. I'm one of those people that look at a tree and decide it's never going to make it so I dig it out way before I should to put something else in the hole that might be more appealing.

"Patience Grasshopper".

Another lesson I've learned is that trees need food, fertiliser . When I arrived I had so many things to do the trees were put in an left so I could get onto more important things. Don't get me wrong I live on some of the most fertile red volcanic soil you have ever seen, things grow while you watch them.  I probably compared the fruit trees to the vegetables I was growing that left to their own devices flourished. Huge cabbage, exploding radish,  zucchini that were a meter long what ever vegetable I planted was almost instant success and I expected the fruit trees to go the same way.  I've learned fruit trees need love and attention, watering when its dry, mulching when its hot, lots of fertiliser treatments and lots and lots of pest control when the tropical wet season sets in.

I'm getting there, I see a way forward with the fruit now, slow and steady.



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