Food Forest

The food forest is finally underway. The trees were ready for collection on Monday and by Tuesday all the trees were loaded and delivered to site. It took several trips and many miles were covered but by the end of the process we had around 500 trees nicely tucked under the shade of a Ficus Burkei, the only tree of any consequence on the property.

It provides a nice shade and is the first fig tree where I managed to verify the legend of the wasp. In fact, I managed to verify this on several occasions and I was stunned. According to Coates and Pelgrave, the flowers of a fig occur internally in a hollow fleshy sphere (the fruit) and are pollinated by a tiny member of the wasp family. Apparently the wasp has to force its way through the "ostiole", the scaly opening at the bottom of every fig. The pollen laden wasp has to be fairly determined as it loses body parts in the process of crawling through the ostiole including legs and wings. When inside, it pollinates all the flowers and then proceeds to lay her eggs in flowers with especially short styles. The flowers with long styles prevent this and are there to produce seed.

The eggs then hatch into larvae which then finally pupate and emerge again as an adult. The males emerge first and are wingless and eyeless but determined, which they must be if they're related to their mothers. They find all the pupae with female wasps, open them up and mate with the females. When the females emerge, they are ready to load up with pollen and perpetuate the cycle. To do this, they have to leave the fig. Obviously the fig ripens after all of this has happened otherwise it would spoil our appetite when spread across a piece of toast. However, the most amazing bit about it all is that each species of fig has it's own species of pollinating wasp. And they're tiny - so small that it is a surprise to find them and this is what I did under the shade of a lonely fig tree.

Working from a planting list and what seemed a small group of plants, we started selecting trees according to our planting zones. Starting with the canopy trees, we then worked through the remainder of the list which included exotic fruit trees, indigenous fruit trees and some ornamental ones for colour or shape. Again, what is a perfectly simple exercise on a piece of paper becomes quite a task when implemented. When I become frustrated at the pace, Johan reminds me of how to eat an elephant - piece by piece. So it is piece by piece that we are tackling this exercise and as in everything, we are making progress.

I have never done this before and am completely unqualified for the task. But I have begun to notice the seasons. A good time to plant according to the Neil who sold me the plants, is after his birthday which has just passed. I've realised that the mosquito's have suddenly appeared in the past few days and I suppose that would be a good planting indicator. So rule one is: when you get bitten half to death lying on your bed by vampire mosquitos, start planting for the season has arrived.

Exploiting my novice status, my mother and sister are compelled to give me advice despite the fact I have a perfectly experienced local person (Neil) giving me instructions. So I've had to scarify the edges of the hole, prefill the hole with water etc. So for the benefit of the women in my life, here on the left is evidence that I've prefilled the holes (which are the correct size by the way) with water and only after the water had soaked into the earth, did we plant the tree. And yes, we did put in some decomposed manure and some bone meal! And if we've forgotten something, it's too late and it's now up to the tree.

One of the hardest things to come to terms with are the names of the trees. There is not one understandable botanical name in the entire tree list. Beside not knowing how to pronounce any of the names, my staff think I'm speaking foreign. Also, locating a single lost Italian (they all end in an 'i' like Luigi) named tree amongst five hundred other Italian sounding names is almost impossible. Even wearing coloured Italian designer jeans, a three day Italian stubble and Italian sunglasses does not help with the pronounciation. C'est la vie.