Jerry is north of Brisbane to visit a home gardener who has built a remarkable food garden over a decade, that enabled her to avoid food shopping for an entire year. Subscribe 🔔 http://ab.co/GA-subscribe

Around 15 years ago Sonia and her partner Rob decided they wanted to start building a food garden. “We never did a plan. We just did it bit by bit. We based it on convenience; we walk here so let’s plant here. It just evolved over time.”

In 2019, Sonia set out on a remarkable challenge to eat 100% of her diet from her garden. “It was just to see if I could do it.”

“I did go to bed hungry a couple of times, but only a couple. It was challenging at times. I really missed bread, but it was really amazing the connection I felt to the garden. I’d love to do it again one day. Especially now that I have honey!”

Growing enough food to live off is a huge achievement, and the fruit trees here would have helped immensely. This area holds a litany of temperate, subtropical and tropical fruit trees; loquat, wampis, bananas, citrus, mulberry and peaches to name just a few. The food forest understory is edible too, with smaller cover crops like pepino and nasturtium.

Sonia has a rare passionfruit species to offer Jerry to try. “It’s a Japanese hard-shelled passionfruit (Passiflora maliformis). You crack the shell with a hammer like a nut, and the flesh is a really creamy passionfruit flavour.”

Nearby, Sonia has an entire area of the garden dedicated to native food plants. Here you’ll find native nutmeg (Myristica insipida, ground kernel used as spice), Fraser Island Apple (Acronychia imperforate, small sweet yellow fruits), white aspen (Acronychia oblongifolia, aromatic white fruit with a pine/mango flavour). She points out the native mulberry (Pipturus argenteus) as her favourite.

Adjacent is an area that Sonia has converted from annual crops into perennial, ornamental natives. Since taking up beekeeping (both stingless and European), Sonia’s been conscious about including more year-round flowering plants in her garden, and to this end, has callistemon, banksia and grevillea planted to help out her growing collection of hives.

Sonia’s not only managing to line her own belly, she’s providing a resource for her community. Out the front of their place she’s set up a stall selling her excess produce, and it’s become very well known in the community. The honesty-based payment system has been such a success, it’s funding Sonia’s holidays, and she feels like people may be putting in extra money - such is the appreciation for her produce.

“We had hard clay at first. It was terrible. We get free mulch from the tip and we have a big trailer. We’ve put down about 150 loads of mulch, and the soil’s improved.” Also enlisted in the soil-improvement effort is a compost bin painted like a pig. “We call her Gloria the compost pig. When she’s full we say ‘it’s time for her to spill her guts.’“

Sonia’s built an impressive food garden in her backyard and achieved something most only dream of by living off it. Her can-do attitude echoes Edmund Hilary and shows the power of starting with what you have, where you are and working bit by bit.

Featured Plants:
WAMPEE - Clausena lansium
LEMONADE TREE - Citrus cv.
BANANA - Musa cv.
PEACH ‘TROPIC BEAUTY’ - Prunus cv.
JABOTICABA - Plinia cauliflora
TAMARILLO - Solanum betaceum cv. *
PEPINO - Solanum muricatum
NASTURTIUM - Tropaeolum majus *
PASSIONFRUIT ‘JAPANESE HARDSHELL’ - Passiflora cv.
BANDICOOT BERRY - Leea indica
EMU BERRY - Grewia latifolia
BIGNAY - Antidesma bunius
WHITE SANDPAPER FIG - Ficus fraseri
CITRUS ‘RED CENTRE LIME’ - Citrus cv.
NATIVE MULBERRY - Pipturus argenteus
* Check before planting: this may be an environmental weed in your area

Filmed on Kabi Kabi Country | Morayfield, Qld
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