Open Garden: Angelo’s Food Forest

ANGELO’S Food Forest is an 80sqm patch in suburban Melbourne.

Angelo's Food Forest

Angelo’s Food Forest 53 Dundas St, Preston.

Owners: Angelo Eliades. Open this weekend, 10am to 4.30pm $7 entry, under 18s free

Describe your garden: It’s a backyard food forest, in suburban Melbourne, which I started in 2008. Three-quarters of the 80sq m garden is garden beds, packed with produce plants including 30 fruit trees, 23 types of berries, dozens of herbs and medicinal plants, and lots of unusual vegetables, both perennial and annual. It’s also designed to appeal to all the senses, filled with scented plants and colourful flowers. To maximise space, vertical gardening uses walls, fences and trellises, including grapes and dragonfruit down one side passage, and hops and youngberries down the other. I’m experimenting now with hydroponic passionfruit and pepinos. It looks like an everyday house at the front until you step through into another world.

What makes it special: It’s Melbourne’s first demonstration backyard food forest garden, where nature does all the work - no digging, weeding or spraying, and it’s all waterwise and organic. It’s a proof-of-concept system of a highly sustainable garden design, to get maximum productivity on a small, intensive scale, with minimum inputs and labour. I average two hours a week working in it. Last year it produced more than 240kg of organic food.

Biggest challenges: Packing more plants on to the garden! Much effort has gone into building the once-depleted and lifeless soil into a rich, healthy and living soil.

You hope visitors will: Be inspired to try some permaculture techniques and to get much more produce out of their gardens. To help freely share information, five years ago I set up the site deepgreenpermaculture.com, a not-for-profit permaculture resource. It has everything - design strategies, step-by-step instructions, full documentation on yields, and photos. I have a scientific background so I test everything rigorously.

Extras: I’m speaking between 1pm and 2pm both days about urban food forests.

Other gardens open this weekend 10am to 4.30pm

$7 entry, under-18s free.

Other open gardens

Farnborough

6530 Illawarra Hwy, Moss Vale, NSW 2577

Riverwalk Gardens

58 Enkleman Rd, Yatala, Qld 4207

9am-3.30pm

Peace and Tranquility

3 Cheviot Place, Dianella, WA 6059 (also open next Wed)

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FLORA

For everyone who received Valentines Day flowers yesterday, here are some tips to keep them vibrant. Cut 2-3cm off the stem ends to help them take up water freely, remove any foliage that will be under water then place immediately into a clean vase full of clean water. A sachet of floral preservative, available at florists, acidifies the water to aid uptake, supplies sugars to feed flowers, and contains a biocide to stop bacteria and fungi. Keep the vase full of water, checking levels daily, and replace the whole solution after two or three days. Heat is the enemy of flowers, which is why florists keep them in cool rooms, so keep blooms away from sun and heat. Ripening fruit nearby can also age flowers. Correct care can more than double the vase life.

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TWIG

My lilac bush has bloomed well for the past two years, but I can no longer obtain the mushroom compost it likes. What’s an alternative?

CYNTHIA MORGANS, SYDNEY

You’ve done well getting lilac to flower outside the cold climate it loves. Mushroom compost is available in bags from nurseries, hardware chains and landscape supplies depots. Although lilacs enjoy alkaline soil, and mushroom compost is often alkaline, check your soil pH has not risen too much from constant applications.

My nine-year-old black sapote tree has flowered, but never fruited. Could it be a male?

JOHN PEARCEY

GOLD COAST, QUEENSLAND

Diospyros digyna, also called chocolate pudding fruit, are generally self-fertile, but some seed-grown trees bear only male flowers and these will never fruit. For identification, male flowers are often in clusters, and won’t have a pea-sized ovary. Most trees bear in three to six years. Buying a grafted, named cultivar is recommended to avoid disappointment.

We have a bumper crop of tomatoes, but they seem to be green for a long time. Can we do something?

CHRIS MONCRIEFF

BY EMAIL

Ripening times depend on the variety and the weather. Warm and sunny but not too hot is ideal. Other factors are sun exposure, size of plant and size of crop. As a rule of thumb, expect 22-30 days from fruit set to ripe for cherry tomatoes and 40-60 days for large fruited varieties.

Lawn armyworms decimate my lawn every February. When do I spray? Will sprays harm birds that eat dead grubs?

FAYE BIBBY, NERANWOOD, QUEENSLAND

You can’t spray to prevent the moths flying in to lay eggs that hatch into these hordes of caterpillars. At the first signs of damage spray with Eco-Neem, which is registered organic, or Dipel, a biological control. Yates Baythroid, a synthetic pyrethroid, will work faster and is also safe for birds.