How to grow a fruit and vegetable food forest on an average suburban block.
Words & photos Jana Homer
Alwyn and Lynda Schuch’s productive patch is on a 580m2 block in Eaton, a north-western suburb of Bunbury in Western Australia.
A construction electrician in South Africa’s gold mines for 27 years, Alwyn first began gardening with his father in North West Province, formerly part of the Transvaal, where the climate is quite similar to Australia’s.
There they grew vegetables, ran free-range chickens and tended an orange orchard, growing fruit for export.
Here in Eaton, he relaxes by reading and researching the Bible, drawing with colour pencils and cooking. Lynda, an accomplished seamstress, spent her working life as a bank officer.
Right now, their focus is on their garden, which comprises 20 metres of raised Colorbond vegie beds where they grow silverbeet, tomato, carrots, spring onions, radishes, capsicum, beetroot, sweet potato, beans, broccoli, pumpkins, celery and white corn as well as a mix of herbs.
There are also several fruit trees — apricots, lemons, custard apples, avocados and pepinos — as well as pineapples and a particularly productive passionfruit vine.
The garden’s real goers are the green and dwarf beans, carrots, silverbeet and white corn. Alwyn claims his corn has grown to the height of the house’s roof gutters — and who are we to argue?
He avoids chemical inputs, insisting the vegies not only grow better without pesticides and herbicides but taste better, too.
By night he’s on bug control, removing pests by hand, the main culprits being slaters and the aphids that attack the fruit trees. There are plenty of earthworms, including some that crawl onto the broccoli and snails that get into the salad greens.
All kitchen and garden waste goes into the compost, to which Alwyn might add cow manure if he thinks it “needs a kick”.
This multipurpose fertiliser goes on the garden every three months where the soils have already been prepared with mushroom compost.
He also soaks banana peels in water for 24 hours and the potassium-laden juice is used to water the chillies.
Improving the plot
It’s a point of pride for Alwyn that he’s managed to turn a small, barren patch into a space where he can grow almost anything. It reminds him of the farm back in South Africa.
Hardly anyone in the neighbourhood has an organic garden like this, he says: “Most gardens around the area are full of pebbles and grass lawns.”
The biggest difficulty was carting in loads of compost. When they moved in, there were four brick garden beds and the space was too narrow. The ground was full of brick and rubble and it had to be flattened, composted and mulched.
It took a lot of hard graft to get the soil up to scratch. Corey from Home Support Bunbury helped work up the soil and still comes regularly to help maintain the gardens.
As far as planting techniques go, Alwyn tends to put in seeds and seedlings in the right season and has made a study of what grows well in the area. He’s found that greens like broccoli do best in winter because there are fewer insects, while in spring and summer he plants bee-attracting vegetables.
Many of the fruit trees, including apples and apricots, have been successfully grown from pips.
He’s even tried hand-pollinating 5 pumpkins by taking the pollen from a male plant to the female plant. Not that there’s any shortage of bees, which flock to the tomatoes and green beans he plants. They especially love the purple passionfruit flowers, he says.
Water is at a premium. The council won’t allow tanks as the water drains off into the nearby creeks where ducks and neighbourhood kids frolic, so the couple stand buckets around the garden to collect water from the roof of the shed.
They’d love to run chooks like Alwyn’s family did back in Africa but they’d have to move to a bigger property.
Curries and pigface
Alwyn loves cooking. A lot of it has to do with his South African and German heritage, in particular the Cape Malay curries he’s famous for.
“Malays brought their expertise to South Africa and their spices were readily available in the stores,” he says. “There is a lot of culinary variety there.”
He also makes maize meal from his white corn, boiling it to a porridge then adding a tomato, onion and chilli relish.
Another South African inspiration is to cut silverbeet and sweet potato leaves into spaghetti-like strips and fry it with onion, garlic, butter, salt and pepper.
The green beans and other excess vegies he cuts up and puts in the deep freeze. Spinach, onion and potatoes are mashed up with butter, salt and pepper.
Any produce that’s left over goes to friends, family and fellow church members. Alwyn also prepares ready-made meals and freezes them for the days when he doesn’t have time to cook.
This year, he made apricot chutney and is even eyeing off the abundant pigface in the garden to see what he can make from it.
And why not? That ground-hugging succulent, known as Hottentot fig where he comes from, has got to be good for something.
Alwyn’s top tips
1. Don’t overwater vegetables.
2. Save your teabags for nitrogen.
3. Keep a compost bin for continuous feeding of plants.
4. Visit the garden regularly to protect vegetables from insects.
5. Don’t give up when seedlings are not successful.
