Explore a Small 50sqm Urban Food Forest Garden in the Suburbs 🌿🍇

Welcome to my 50sqm suburban food forest! 🌿 In today’s summer garden tour, I’m taking you through my front yard and showing you everything I’m growing in this small but incredibly productive space. From fruit trees and annual veggies to edible groundcovers and flowers for pollinators — you’ll see how much food you can grow even in a tiny suburban garden.

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► More about me & my edible gardens:

🌱 I am a Kiwi 🥝
🌱 Located in Perth, Australia
🌱 Zone 10b ish
🌱 720sqm urban property
🌱 Sandy-based soil
🌱 Hot, dry climate
🌱 Permaculture Practices
🌱 Fruit tree collector
🌱 Creating long-term sustainable gardens

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Welcome to the garden. Let’s take a full tour and see what is growing here in my front yard in Perth, Australia at the start of summer. If you’re new here, my name is Holly and I am turning my suburban property into a edible food forest to try and grow as many different types of fruit as I can. Today I want to give you a little bit of a tour, see what’s growing, see what I’ve been doing in the garden. been making a few changes out here to try and get ready for summer because summer is on the way and in Perth summer is very hot, crispy, spicy hot and the first day of summer for us was 40°. So, if that doesn’t call you out on what is working and what isn’t, I don’t know what else does. Let’s go take a look. So, I’ve got four raised garden beds and this is where I grow my annual veggies. A lot of things that I can change up each season I can play with. And at the moment, a lot of it is going to flower into seed. So, I can save the seeds. So, lettucees like these are all going to flower, and I can save the seeds on those to regrow next year. I get a whole bunch of seeds for free. It means I can be really generous with my planting. I sew seeds everywhere because I have a huge abundance of them. So, here we’ve got a little cucumber that I have some string lines for to climb up this arbor. Chili plants. In here is some like beetroots dotted all in between. I’ve got a little pepper plant in here. And um lots of seeds sewing. So these will all start popping up. We’ve got chives, edible flowers. A lot of these have gone to seed as well, so I can save the seeds from these. And then we’ve got more chard. That is going to be hundreds of lettuce seeds. So I’ll be saving those. This one here is my favorite herb. This is pineapple sage. And then hidden underneath down here under the pineapple sage is a little cucumber seed that’s popping up in its own little microclimate there. Nice and protected. So down here I’ve got the cucumbers ready to start going up this arbor. Some more edible flowers. The sweet potato popped up on its own and I’m actually happy about it because it’s going to offer some more shade. So, I’m going to be training this up the arbor to give a bit of shade. And actually, it’s really helping out my custard apple that’s right here because this likes a little bit more protection from the hot sun. And even the branches that are close to this are doing much better than the the ones out here by themselves that are really hot and isolated. As well as a few annual climbers to hopefully get up there, get some shade. I’ve got the bottle gourd. I’ve got the cucumbers to grow up this um trellis. But while those are all young and little, I’ve kept in a lot of these other plants like my rainbow chard and my um lettucees that have gone to seed to just give a little bit of shade and protection so everything is not out here alone cooking in the sun. I have a papaya in the corner there. So, that’s a bit of an experiment. I haven’t got a lot of perennials um other than some herbs in my raised garden beds because that just allows me to change it up each each season. It’s a little bit of a place to play to have fun. Whereas the rest of the garden is sort of you plant it once and hopefully leave it there. I mean, I still move things about and change things obviously, but um the raised garden beds are a lot more of a quick changing thing. So, I just popped that there cuz I had some spare leftover plants because I grew a whole lot of papayas from seed, which are super easy to do. And I think it’s going to be a bit of a mini dwarfed papaya. So, we’ll see. I do love an experiment. I recently just popped in some strawberry plants here as well. We’ve got more beetroot, more rainbow chard, some sage here on the corner, which is really close to the front door, so I can come out and pick sage and chives uh really easily for dinners. Over here on this pole, I do have a grape vine. So, this grape vine is the Sultana grape. It is a green grape and it’s going to be growing up this pole. Um, and then I have another one behind me here which has reached the top and that is the flame which is a red grape. I do have four grape varieties to grow up up this ara. This one down here is the black maru and it has just recently in the last week started taking off. It’s about halfway up the ara. The goal is for these grapes to get to the top of the arbor by the end of the season so that next year I can start um pruning them and training them across. But to start with, I really want to get them up to the top of the arbor. And I’m really excited about those. I can’t wait to have grapes hanging down here to also have so much more shade over summer, but then let the light in in winter. On this end, I have got my Nashi pair. I’ve got one Nashi pair here, one on the other end, and the one on the other end has a little baby Nashi pear on it. I did get um two off it last season and they were delicious. I freaking love Nashi pears. They are an amazing um pair to grow in a warmer climate because they don’t need as many chill hours. So, that is going to protect my garden from the hot afternoon sun because the sun starts here in this corner and it tracks around the back of my house and finishes up right here. So this gets hammered with the hot afternoon sun. So I have been starting to do a little bit of tweaks on that by adding in some Queensland arrow root down here on the corners. I have also added some here. So that grows about this high and you can see that growing really lush in a lot of other parts of my garden. I use that as shade and then I cut it back and chop and drop and put that back into my garden. Then behind me here we’ve got my fourth raised garden bed. I’ve got some more Queensland arrow root down here on this corner. I’ve got a custard apple. This is the African pride. I also have some self-sewn tomatoes. So, we have a few tomatoes on those. I ended up planting more cucumbers on this trellus. Originally, I planted some rockmelons and I thought all the seeds got eaten, but I’ve noticed a few popping up. So, I’ll either have rockmelons and cucumbers on this and I’ll probably have the same over here. a little bit of a mixture which I don’t mind. I do like a surprise and I do like a little bit of a wild garden. And look at this beauty you guys. This is a plum and I’ve grown it quite a flat shape as espalia so I can still get in and out of the driveway here. So it’s not growing like an open center like a lot of stone fruit. I do grow some of my trees with central leaders or with other shapes like this one which is I’m training to grow in a really flat espalier shape. But this is protecting my garden from the hot afternoon sun. And the little cucumbers down here will be very happy about that. So, I’ve got some uh on the corner here to grow up this massive pink rainbow chard going to seed. I’ve never had so many rainbow chards going to seed. I am going to have so many rainbow chard seeds, which is going to be amazing cuz I don’t often save the rainbow chard seeds. I save a lot of lettuce seeds, but um yeah, we’re definitely going to have a huge amount of those. Every day I like to come out and see what’s popping up. I’ve got some little carrots popping up here. Um, some snapdragons. Look at these beautiful snapdragons. And I have sprinkled these seeds throughout the rest of my garden. So, there’ll be snapdragons popping up in amongst everything. So, that is my four raised garden beds. Now, there is a whole lot more things growing here. I have so many fruit trees scattered all around my garden beds down what was a pathway there. I’ve also got my 10 m privacy hedge that is packed full of edibles and fruit trees. So, we’ll go and take a look at that. And then we’ve got my centropic garden, the pond, some more fruit trees. There’s a lot to see. So, let’s go. So, originally this was a pathway and now I’ve started adding into it because I ran out of room and I wanted to plant more fruit trees. I mean, there’s still room to walk at the moment, so that’s a bonus. And I am pruning things so that they are flat to give me that space to walk. So this is my multig grafted plum. It has about um four or five different types of plums on it. And I again I’m pruning it so that I can get down this walkway. Here I have a mango. This is the orange shervet mango. And I recently pruned this. We pruned this in my last video. And it’s already shot off a lot of growth a lot lower down because originally it was very tall and lanky. And because my garden is a small garden, this front bit here is about 50 square m. So it’s not a huge space, so I don’t want to have um 1.5 m of trunk before I even start getting fruit. So we pruned this and it’s doing really well. I’ve added in some more Queensland arrow root on the sides of it just to give a bit more protection to also then have more mulch so that I can feed this mango. So, every tree I’m sort of trying to give more support plants, try and give more mulch plants so that they can have their own mulch, their own fertilizer. Um, because that’s something that’s been really apparent in my gardens is that I just don’t have enough nutrition for the amount of fruit trees that I have. But that is something I’m working on. So, we’ve got the mango. I’ve got a bit of a gap here. So, there used to be a seed grown papaya here, which didn’t last. I’m debating what to put here because the space will eventually disappear with the mango here. I have an avocado behind this shade cloth here and this feed jaw. So, this isn’t a space that’s going to be available for long term. So, I don’t know what I’m going to put here. I’m either going to put some dwarf bananas. That’s probably what I’m going to put here actually is the dwarf bananas, some dwarf duccast bananas. Um, otherwise something like a papaya would have been really great because it would have given me a bit of umbrella shade and then I could eventually take that out um after a few years. So yeah, papayas or bananas potentially to go here. Behind the shade cloth, we’ve got my Linda avocado. Um, young avocados need a little bit more protection from the hot afternoon sun, so I have got this shade cloth up, but it’s doing really, really well. This big one on the corner here, this is a seed growing uh pigeon pee. And again, this is one of my mulch plants to chop back and feed these fruit trees here. There’s Lucky Linda in there getting lots of attention um with some shade cloth. Again, you can see I’ve just been adding in here in the gaps. This one here is my Indian blood peach. And like I said before, I’m pruning this one to be more of a central leader to be more vertical growing. Has got two main um stems and then little ones branching out from that. So it’s more like a Christmas tree shape so that I can keep it really narrow and grow up rather than cutting it, making it open vase because that’s going to take up a lot more space um in this line of trees because I really want to keep this pathway open. So yeah, some of my fruit trees are more central leader are more Christmas tree shaped to save room in a small garden. So along from my peach, we have my custard apple. This is the Hillary white custard apple and more Queensland arrow root. We’ve got New Zealand spinach. Got the New Zealand spinach down here fighting some of this grass as an edible ground cover. And then in here is my Bulock’s heart custard apple seedling which is doing really well. It’s got a little bit of a nest in here surrounded by the Queensland arrow root to protect it. Then through here is my starf fruit. It’s got its own little microclimate in here which is much more protected surrounded in plants. Then we have my aprium, the cotton candy atrium. Some beautiful New Zealand spinach ground cover down here. Loving a little bit more of the shade and moisture. We’ve got the sour soap. More Queensland Arrow. And this is my buffer against the hot driveway. So that’s where we were in here. That’s the sour soap. That’s that row down there. And on the end, I have got my hardy plants like my pomegranate. Look at that in a minute. Let’s go and look at this 10 m privacy hedge. I mean, you can’t even see the road anymore. So, it’s doing its job. So, this is my front privacy hedge. And I mean, you can hardly see the house now. Um, and from my lounge, I can barely see the road. So, it’s working really well. I It’s on the southern side of my property, so it’s not the sun is over here, so it’s not blocking any light from my garden. Um, so I’ve chosen a lot of evergreens, a lot of hardy plants that can withstand the hot conditions. You can see here things are starting to get dry and crispy very quickly. And my verge garden, which is actually alive despite how it looks. There’s a few little pigeon peas popping up in this verge garden that we planted. I have Queensland arrowroot, pigeon pee seeds. All right, so down here on the corner, I have a dwarf mango. This is the king Thai mango. Then I have my pigeon pee which is acting as a buffer from that hot afternoon sun. Also lots of mulch and chop and drop. I’ve got yarrow as a ground cover down here. Um Queensland arrow for the middle layers. There’s some New Zealand spinach just pops up everywhere. This beauty is my lemonade tree. And the most amazing thing about this lemonade tree this year is that it’s had multiple flushes of flowers. So, I’m going to get an extended harvest, which is exciting. So, it’s got fruit on it at the moment, but it’s also still flowering. It’s got baby fruits. It’s got some bigger fruits. So, normally this comes in one big flush, and I get overwhelmed with lemonades, but it looks like it’s going to be spread out this year, which is exciting. Next to the lemonade, we have the Fijaw. This is a grafted variety. It has got two types of Fijaws on it because I grafted a second one on. This is the first tree I ever grafted. It’s my first grafting project. So, I’m very proud of this one. This is a duffy with a white goose grafted on top and covered in fruit. I’ve got a sapadilla seed down here which I planted. We’ve got my mandarin, my hixon mandarin, which has some fruit on it. This one here is in the firing line to get removed because it’s just a tree that we don’t really enjoy the fruit on. And I think it’s really important that you don’t just keep things for the sake of keeping. It does provide benefit to the garden, but also space is limited. And if I don’t love the fruit, sorry, but we’ve got a seedling loid in there. We’ve got a white guava here. And I have got some fruitfly traps in the trees. They love guava, but I will be netting and bagging all of the fruit. This is my blood orange tree, which I love. Another one of the pruned mangoes which hasn’t leafed out yet but I’m sure it won’t be far away. Um we’ve got more yrow down here as a ground cover. And we have another Fija. This one is a another grafted variety. It’s the Nazimmits Queensland arrowroot in here as the middle layer. Then we have my dwarf Tahesian lime. And this stick in here is the sweet tart mango and it is starting to push new growth since we cut it. So won’t be long. And then this one will have new growth. And again, it won’t be so lanky and long. And next to that we have a sapadilla. So this is a grafted sapadilla, which is also known as the brown sugar fruit. Tucked away in there. It’s got a really nice little microclimate in there. Nice and shaded and protected next to this big rosemary. All right, so this is probably my most exciting garden at the moment. It’s looking so good. And this was just started from a patch of bear dirt. So you can see Queensland arrow roots are doing all the leg work. This garden would not be anywhere near as lush without these. If you deleted all of these from my garden, there would be a lot of a lot more gaps. It would be a lot hotter. They’re really helping bring the temperature down. This is my moringa. So this has been getting hammered by the snails. There’s a few on it at the moment, but it’s pulling through and it is getting taller. So, this is going to be uh my shade tree for this part of the garden. I really want a beautiful canopy with these leaves. It’s going to give a really good dappled light to my tropicals like my star fruit, my sour. And underneath, I do have a Brazilian cherry popping up. Then in the middle there, I’ve got my choet avocado. I’ve got a Louisa plum here and an actual seed grown guava that popped up out of the compost, the worm castings. So, um, it’s in there for now, but may not stay there. This is my native HA. And then I have got my lemon mango on this side. So, this garden bed will eventually be mango and avocado with a plum in the middle. But, at the moment, it’s surrounded with pigeon pee, Queensland arrow, moringa, all of these things. Help me get it established. then we can chop and drop and feed those plants. So, it’s very dense at the moment, but that is exactly what I want for a hot summer here in Perth. I want as much density as I can, as much shade as I can. So, I’m still not there yet. I need more. And then on this side of the garden bed, here’s the chokeet avocado. Again, we have another sepia. I’ve got a um midnight velvet black pomegranate. Um we’ve got New Zealand spinach down here as a ground cover. Some edible flowers. I recently popped in some seed grown cherry guavas, a lemon cherry guava, just because I have them sitting around, so they may as well be in here. Start providing some shade and some food. I can eventually cut those out. I’ve got a cho muck. I’ve got my bird bath in here, which the snails are loving at the moment. And then over here we’ve got this is my dwarf ducass which I was hoping was going to send out some pups that I could put some around the place but at the moment it doesn’t have any side pups. Um but it is growing really quickly and it is looking amazing. There’s just something about bananas in the garden that make it look more tropical and I just cannot wait to be harvesting racks of bananas. I feel like that is my ultimate goal is to be harvesting racks of bananas and I’ll feel like I’ve made it. Can you imagine just like this garden here and there’s like a rack of bananas hanging there? Like I feel like that’s it. Key. So I do want to have a few other patches of bananas. And here in Perth it is so warm which bananas love. The only thing they don’t love is the wind and I have a lot of wind. So just creating some little buffers, wind barriers is going to really help it. And growing shorter dwarf varieties. I have a plantain banana out the back and it is so tall it gets hammered with wind. All the leaves get shredded. Um and then when the leaves are shredded, they don’t they aren’t able to photosynthesize as much. So you’re going to get smaller racks of bananas or no racks of bananas. So if you live in a windy climate, that’s a tip for you. Grow dwarf bananas. On this end of the garden bed is my Paxton prolific custard apple. Um, and I’ve added some more Queensland arrow roots here on the edges of these two garden beds again to try and just give a buffer to protect these beds from getting so hot from the sun in summer. Can always delete them. I can always chop and drop them. This is a cutting. I just shoved some cutings of my pomegranates around the place as well because pomegranates are super hearty. They do well in the heat. Um, and they’re deciduous, so they’re going to lose their leaves and let light in in winter. And I can literally just take a cutting and stick it wherever I want, grow it. I can get fruit off it pretty quickly. And then if it’s too big or I don’t want it in that spot anymore, I can delete it because I just literally popped a stick in a jar of water and grew roots or I popped a stick in the soil and grew roots. It didn’t cost me anything. I haven’t really talked about this garden bed too much, but this garden bed, this was an existing garden bed when we bought the house, and it just had some dead roses in it. So, it hasn’t ever really done too well because it’s under the eaves of the house. It doesn’t get rain, and it gets a lot less sun because the house shades it out first. But, it’s starting to come together. I have put in a Brazilian cherry and it’s pushing so much new growth. It’s a black patanga Brazilian cherry. So that’s an evergreen. It’s going to be very bushy and I can just prune that to how I want it. I’ve got a dwarf plum which has done absolutely nothing. But again, because this space is restricted, I don’t want them to get huge. So the fact that they’re really stalled and slow doesn’t really bother me. We have sweet potato as a I got bitten by an ant. Ow. You probably should be wearing shoes. I’ve got um sweet potato all in here as well. And that acts as a really nice lush low green edible ground cover because this is outside the windows. So I think that works really well. This one here is a yellow cherry guava. So that’s the one that I saved seeds from and planted some little seedlings in other parts of my garden. That is the mother plant and it’s got some fruit on it at the moment. This one is right next to my pond. So, this is the pond. This is a tiny pond. People are really surprised. It’s 1 m square. So, it’s um it’s I think it’s just over a meter by a meter. And then it’s about 30 cm deep. And I have little fish. I’ve got minnows, the orange ones, and then I’ve got tadpoles. There’s also a few frogs that hang about. We’ve got potentially Kevin. We don’t know. Someone has come back to the garden. Um someone has come back to the pond. I’m not sure if it’s Kevin or not. Got a bunch of different plants in here. And then this garden bed here has mint which has escaped the pond and is in here, but it doesn’t matter because this is very contained and I’m just keeping it from going over into the grass. I mean, it’s so hot and dry here in Perth that I can easily get rid of things if I don’t want them cuz I can just not water them and they will be completely dead. So, in this garden bed, I’ve got mint. I’ve got thyme. I’ve got Oh, I think I just disturbed the frog. I heard a splash. Sorry. Um, this is a little miniature miniature uh dwarf nectarine. So, that’s only going to get to 1.5 m high. I’ve got some bromeilads, few native little flowers, some yrow. Um, trying to keep it really nice and lush. So the uh insects and the frogs have places to hide. Lebanese crest. But yeah, I love this pond. It is tiny but very mighty um for beneficial insects and wildlife. And also because it’s right outside my office or outside my window, I can get the most enjoyment out of it. And I can see things happening that I wouldn’t normally see because if I come out here, often the frogs get scared or things get scared. But I can see them through my window and be a little bit more stealth.