My daughter planting the first seed in the brand new raised garden beds
Cherry tomato ‘Sugar Lump’
Elle with newly planted sweet potato ‘Northern Star’.
The raised beds covered in mesh to try and keep the bandicoots and chickens out.
Sweet potato ‘Northern Star’ with Salvia ‘Black and Bloom’
Elle very excited with the first homegrown asparagus of the season
Pumpkin Red Kuri growing into the paddock. This is a vigorous grower and we harvested over 25 pumpkins from this one plant!
Yummy homegrown carrots!
Chives and multiplying onion ‘White Bunching’. White Bunching grows extremely well in North Queensland.
The veggie garden after the rain – in need of a big tidy up! All those weeds will make fantastic mulch!
The raised beds in the vegetable garden.
Elle with a bunch of pumpkins ready for harvest. These are pumpkin ‘Red Kuri’
Silverbeet ‘Barese’
Young asparagus seedlings
Young bean seedlings, ‘Idelight’
Bean ‘Kentucky Wonder’
Celery ‘Tall Utah’
Beautiful productive cucamelon
Hard work getting the first bed ready for plantig
The first raised bed filled with horse manure, lawn clippings, and brown leaves. A layer of weeds at the bottom for a juicy sandwich!
Letting the lettuce go to seed for seed saving
Nasturtium with gorgeous red flowers
Newly transplanted strawberry runners in the asparagus bed
Pumpkin Red Kuri
Pumpkin Sweet Dumpling
Freshly transplanted strawberry runners
The vegetable garden before we put in the raised beds – nothing planted yet!
The veggie garden before we put in the raised beds
Basil ‘Mammoth’
The raised beds in the vegetable garden covered with mesh against chickens and bandicoots.
Elle in the veggie patch with Athena, our 25-year old quarterhorse. Pumpkin Red Kuri in the foreground.
photo gallery
Around the Farm
photo gallery
The Coconut Circle
The start of the coconut circle. I dug this circle around an existing young coconut palm. It wasn’t feeling happy so I hoped that the addition of some coconut friends would create a better environment for it to thrive.
Young coconut palms are now planted.
The young coconut palms planted in the circle. I planted them at around 1m apart!
A thick layer of mulch prevents the circle from drying out too quickly and keeps the soil healthy.
I chose drip irrigation for the coconut circle. This did not work very well once the plants got bigger and the hose kept blocking up. Unless you install filters, stick to bigger sprinklers or hand watering!
I added sweet potato as a ground cover. Sweet potato loves the loose, raised soil on the edges.
The coconuts are doing very well! I added Salvia to increase insect activity. I also added Aibika (Queensland Greens) to increase diversity, as well as paw paw (Papaya) and Malibar spinach.
The Malibar spinach growing up the coconut tree.
This coconut looks very happy in its circle home!
Another view of the coconut circle where you can see the paw paw on the left, and Aibika growing tall.
The coconut palms are loving it! This is about 1.5 years after planting. Coconuts aren’t the fastest growers (at least not in my experience) but these palms are doing extremely well. You can see the mulch pile in the middle. This hole in the middle provides you with a place to chuck all your prunings, clippings, sticks, and leaves. As it breaks down, it will provide a nice food source for the plants in the circle!
This is the start of another circle. I loved my coconut circle so much, I have now created 6 others. This circle, thankfully, was dug by my husband on the excavator. It’s certainly possible by hand (as I did with the first circle) but a machine makes it a lot easier!
