Organic fruit in the backyard

I felt the seasons change slightly yesterday. There was a nip in the air when I took the dogs outside early in the morning, and although it didn't stay cool for long, I know Autumn is not far away. Autumn is my favourite time of year. It's still warm in the daytime, cool at night and there is that wonderful change happening in the garden. Trees shift from green to gold and red, leaves fall, flowers bloom and we plant our main vegetable garden for the year.

There is not much growing now, just a few late eggplant and cucumbers, my experimental pineapple, herbs and fruit. It's the fruit that keeps us going at the moment, although we aren't eating much of it yet but there are lemons and bananas growing, plenty of passionfruit almost ready to pick and the blueberries arejust starting.

I wandered around the garden yesterday taking these photos for you. The first is the loquat tree. We cut this back heavily last year because it was too tall for us to pick any fruit. The bats ate the entire crop. This year I hope we get to share with them as I would love to make loquat jam. There are no loquats on the tree yet, and that may be the result of the pruning but I'll keep my eye on it for further developments.

Right next to the loquat tree is a group of about six bananas. There is only one bunch of bananas this year but if we can keep the birds and bats away, they'll be ready to eat late April. The birds love to eat the nectar from that red flower at the end of the spike. When that falls off and the bananas are a bit bigger, we can cut them off and hang the bunch in the shed to ripen.

Behind the bananas the creek is flowing slowly by. It's been much higher than it is right now but it's still holding a fair amount of water that will spill into the Pacific Ocean about 10 kms from here. Clicking on the photos will enlarge them.

Walking next to the fence that runs along the creek bed we find these golden passionfruit growing. There are about 40 fruit on the vines now. When we harvest them in the next couple of weeks, we'll cut the vines back so we have healthy growth later in the year.

And here is the aquaponics garden I planted out yesterday. In the foreground are yellow button squash, and behind are Roma tomatoes and dwarf green beans. We've had the aquaponics garden for almost a year now, so we're still novices, but we're happy with it most of the time. Hanno cleaned this grow tank out a couple of weeks ago and removed all the old roots and leaves left by past crops.

We are also growing silver perch in this system. They are swimming in a 3000 litre tank just below this grow bed. There are about 12 fat fish that are reaching 12 inches in length and I am hoping we can eat some of them for my birthday dinner in mid-April. We have about 80 perch in the tank but we haven't worked out yet when we should add the next batch of fish for next year. Our fish didn't grow much at all last winter so I wonder if it's best to restock in spring. I'll have to do some research on that.

I'll be able to do that research tomorrow as that is when we get our broadband speed back again after almost three weeks of a speed limited service. I haven't been able to visit many of my favourite blogs during that time because sometimes the pages didn't load at all, or they took so long I gave up. I will have a good time tomorrow catching up with what everyone has been doing.

Swappers, don't forget your swap deadline, Sharon wrote about it in the post below. I'm really looking forward to seeing all the photos. I am really grateful to Sharon and Lorraine for organising the swaps for me. Thanks gals!

I hope you have a great weekend. Thank you all for visiting and for your thoughtful comments.