Today I became a farmer…well sort of!
Since moving into our current home, I have moved on from the lush tropical gardens of our past home and taken a more self sustaining approach to gardening. Yes me with the black thumb has decided to grow fruit and veges.
As I have mentioned here in the past, my goal is to build our forever home and do a bit of permaculture. If you are someone that knows me very well…possibly a parent or a close friend or relative…you would be laying on the floor laughing right now as if the words “Michelle” and “Gardening” were a joke when used in the same sentence. Yes, I may not be known for my gardening skills but what I lack in skill I make up for with enthusiasm.
We may not be in our forever home yet but what spurred me on to give fruit and vege gardening a go already was that our current home has an already established mango tree and some other tree that we can’t figure out – possibly an orange or a lemon. It also comes with an abundance of snails which ate all the flowers on the possible orange/lemon tree so it never gave us fruit and subsequently we never got to find out what it’s true identity is!
Every morning I get up, pull the blind up in the kitchen and gaze out at the mango tree and one fruit in particular as if I am checking that the snails, a bird or a bat hasn’t fled with it during the night. Then today it started. Today the fruit started falling off the tree. After months of checking in on the tree, finally we have ripe fruit!
I felt so chuffed to take 2 of the 3 mangoes I scored to my parents house and say “here you go, home grown off the tree”. Yes I was showing off!!
I’ve already planted in pots two types of lemons, a blood orange and an avocado tree in the hopes of getting them to a mature stage for planting at our new farm. I also planted six varieties of herbs….that I keep forgetting are there when I am cooking and so barely use! Ruby and I had a go at starting some seeds – roma tomatos, spring onion and capsicum. Unfortunately the snails ate the growth we got so its back to the drawing board with that!
Have fun!
By Michelle