Thank you for all of the lovely comments so far. Many of you have asked for a list of plants we grow. We have a very diverse garden. The garden is a testing site for plants. So far we have evaluated about 500 different edible species. Of those 500 about 200 turned out to be real winners in our climate. I’m not going to go through all 200 here.

In terms of biomass our key perennial edibles would be Sambung, Cranberry hibiscus, Okinawa spinach, Brazilian spinach, Pigeon pea, winged beans, Lebanese cress, Java dropwort, kangkong, native river mint, Mediterranean basil, cassava, sweet potato, yacon, arrowhead, ginger, katuk, all herb and plectranthus, lemongrass, lemon verbena, Malabar spinach, madagascar bean, winged yams, actually most yams, and I’m going to leave it there for now. If you start with these, in a balanced food forest then you are off to a very good start.

We also have hundreds of fruit trees but the jury is still out on which will be our start performers as many take many years to get their first crop and the garden is only about 10 years old, some parts only months old! So far the front runners are Native mulberry, Gin Berry, Atherton Raspberry, macadamia (ok a nut), Tamarillos, Quapples, Panama Berries, Acerola Cherries, Strawberry Guava, Loquat, Fejoa, Citrus (Lisbon Lemon, Tahitian Lime, Lemonade Fruit and Orange), Bananas (Pissang Celong, Blue Java and Dwarf Ducass), Black Sapote, Pepino, Dianella, Peanut Butter Bush, Dragon Fruit and Passionfruit (if you can beat the animals to them).