At the back of my garden I have 2 beautiful old plum trees and I think a lemon tree was almost the first thing I planted in my garden when I moved in. Somewhere along the line 3 feijoa trees were also planted but until recently all the other trees were ornamental and/or functional (trying to screen out the neighbours).
As I progressed on my journey towards a more productive garden, expanding the veggie garden was the first step followed closely by planting berries of different sorts. Then I started putting a fruit tree here and there amongst the rest of the garden, but over the last couple of years I have dedicated more areas to fruit trees. I was tempted to plant in a typical ‘orchard-like’ fashion but thankfully common-sense prevailed and I have stuck with the original garden layout and planted the fruit trees in the garden beds. That way it still looks ‘decorative’ as well as being functional.
Where possible I have chosen dwarf varieties and planted quite densely with the intent of pruning to keep things under size control but still producing reasonable quantities (time will tell on that one). At first glance there doesn’t seem to be very much there but I amazed myself when I started listing out all the different types of fruiting plants that I have managed to squeeze in. They were all looking very leafless when I took the photos but they are leafing up now and hopefully it will be a very different story this summer.
Beside my patio area along the fence I have a persimmon, a grapevine, a fig tree and a dwarf nectarine.
Behind the patio area, the dedicated fruiting area has 3 cherry guavas, 2 raspberries, 3 blackcurrants, a strawberry bed, 3 ballerina apple trees, a banana passionfruit, an ordinary passionfruit, a lime, a navel orange, a ruby grapefruit and an orange grapefruit, 3 bambino feijoas, and a fig tree.
In the veggie garden area there is a lemon, a lime, and a Satsuma mandarin, more strawberries, 5 blueberry bushes, thornless blackberries, 2 more raspberries, and a feijoa in a tub.
And in the back corner in an area that never really got developed previously, to join the 3 feijoas (that I have hopefully coaxed to fruit again) and a self-set cherry guava I have now planted a dwarf banana, several lady’s finger bananas (suckers of different sizes from a friend), an elderberry (from another friend), 2 macadamia nut trees (one a self-set seedling), a tamarillo, flatto peach, dwarf apricot and another dwarf nectarine.
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