Robert Longmore

Hi from SW Western Australia.  My dictum for the food garden is to grow what you eat and eat what you grow. Yes, experiment with different plants but don't persist if you don't enjoy them. Be prepared to freeze or dry excess crops, and have hens or ducks to consume excess or waste plant materials or any food scraps. I give all waste chicken bones, prawn shells, cooked egg shells to our small hen flock which then reward me with beaut eggs. Hens are evolved from jungle scavengers and live to dig around in soil and weed oatches and are great nanagers of kitchen waste. My thoughts, and many thanks to the great contributors in this stream set. Happy New Year 2023!

Hi. I'm with the "all vege scraps are good" school, together with all the necessary brown stuff. I put wet cardboard boxes through my shredder, together with lots of plant twigs, branches and leaves. I pick out any plastic strips as they appear for separate disposal. Shredded paper waste is collected from our hen nest area when it has been well added to by their droppings.  I also water the heaps with my collected urine and worm farm liquor.
The final mix is cold composted for a good month or two in several beds, before use.

A fascinating post on using buried wood. Here in SW Western Australia I have depths of very dead sandy soil. Over the years I have dug 3 ft deep holes and thrown in the odd bit of over-ripe road kill, eg roos, then lots of perennial weed waste and tree rubbish, the sort of the experts say one shouldn't in the compost heap. I found the heaps settle down well and slowly rot withput the perennials becoming a repeat threat. I've often positioned these 'weed' holes to benefit nearby Citrus tree roots.

I've found that sowing mature seed collected from the dropped, drying cones works well. No treatment necessary.  I've used this for Stone Pines here in Western Australia,  grown from my own seed sown tree which us now very big!

How sad that as a resident of Western Australia I am not allowed to download this Sepp Holtzer packagethe 3 documentaries. It’s not as though any postage is involved.
Not happy, guys!

Greetings from SW Western Australia where we enjoy a temperate climate. This obviously suits many herbs and medicinal plants of Mediterranean origins. We do have a 30 x 30m Food  Forest already set up in our orchard on our 8 acre block, and it is netted to protect the produce against the predations of our '28s' parrots and small silvereye birds which are truly capable of wreaking havoc on any ripening fruits.
I have used flowering herbs such as chicory, rosemary, borage and European dandelion as attractors to insect pollinators and this has worked well. I have planted a variety of soft fruits, including  berries, apples, pears, plums, apricots, nectarines and quinces. Lower containers yield some Asian edible plants including daikon, burdock, and a variety of beaut edible greens.
In my past academic life, I published a goodly number of articles on medicinal herbs in the Australian Pharmacist journal. I continue to be strongly interested in the benefits of such herbs and would love to learn of their potential application to our food forest.