Chapter 2
How to Have a Garden You Can Guzzle

We grow lots of different varieties of fruit at our place – about forty-six sorts of apples, five sorts of oranges, plums, avocados, custard apples, cherries, peaches, pears, walnuts…okay, you probably don’t want me to list all of them (it’d take the whole page anyway).

There’s never a time in the year when you can’t roam around our garden and munch at least six sorts of fruit, not to mention heaps of different vegetables.

We grow a LOT of fruit. The birds feast on cherries and avocados and apples and strawberries, and the wombats munch fallen lemons (wombats are weird sometimes) and the wallabies guzzle oranges and the juice runs down their stomachs so they’re sticky and disgusting…

How do I get my garden like this?
(Perhaps without the wombats and wallabies.)

You just start planting.

Many types of fruit trees don’t fruit for four or five years, or even longer, and most of them take a lot of work, but there are some fruits you can plant that will give you stuff to eat in the first year.

If you plant strawberry plants in a pot today you might be eating strawberries in a few months time! Spit out the plum stones from the plums in your lunch box and you can grow a plum tree!

Some plants really have to be looked after – watered and weeded and fed. But others just grow themselves. When you learn how to feed and water plants you’ll see how easy it is.

It’s like riding a bicycle. It’s hard at first, then you don’t even think about it. The first few plants you grow may be hard work, then suddenly you think ‘Hey, this is simple! Why didn’t I do this before?’

But my mum and dad say we don’t have
room in our garden for anything else.

Aha…be sneaky.

Have you got a bare fence? Plant a passionfruit vine.

Have you got somewhere you can put a pot? Grow watermelons.

You can grow a cumquat tree in a tub on the patio.

You can grow potatoes in a bucket.

You can grow strawberries in a hanging basket.

There’s always room for more plants, if you really think about it. Keep reading and I’ll show you how!

But we don’t even have a garden.
We live in a flat!

No excuse. Grow a pot of strawberries on a sunny windowsill, or a dwarf peach tree in a pot on the patio, or even parsley in your joggers, or transform your school so you can spend all lunchtime wandering from tree to tree guzzling…

ANYONE can have a garden to gobble – even if you live in the tiniest flat in the biggest city.

But I don’t have any money to buy plants!

Who cares! Just plant the seeds from the fruit in your lunch box.