Nana Glor's birthday is April 25, Anzac Day. In 2008 we took a family trip up to Gympie to celebrate Nana's 81st birthday. We had planned to go to town for the Anzac service but Dad (Poppa Kerry) decided he would poke around in Grandad's garden instead. So Bronte, Juliette and I waved goodbye to the ladies and then set about finding out exactly what Grandad had growing in his backyard.

First the girls spotted the rows of snow peas and beans. I remembered how when Nana and Grandad lived on the acreage at Gildora I used to really want to help pick the beans and would get one of the picking bins and join Nana out in the rows of beans but could never make it right to the end of even one row. I would get bored with it after a few minutes and would tip my beans into Nana's tin and run off to play. Here at Victory Heights the bean patch was much more manageable, just 20 plants or so. Grandad was letting a few of the beans go to seed to use for his next season's planting.

Along the back fence Bronte found pumpkins rambling under an avocado tree. Grandad wasn't at all happy with the tree which hadn't yet bore him one avocado despite the years of TLC he'd given it. Also hiding under the avocado were some pineapple tops that Grandad had planted. There was a little pineapple sprouting from one of them. It was the first time the girls had seen how pineapples grow.

Next we came across a mandarin tree, its boughs drooping under the weight of a bumper crop. While we stood around peeling and eating a few Grandy told us how on the previous weekend the girls' cousins Amelia and Imogen and Caitlyn and Paige had spent a great hour picking and tossing mandarins over the fence into the neighbours yard. "Little rats" he called them affectionately. Buddy Boy sampled a mandarin and thought it tasted pretty good.

Nearby Grandad had rows of strawberries, potatoes, more beans, zucchinis and some tomato bushes bearing fruit. Juliette picked us a bag of beans to take home and cook for dinner (though they never actually made it home if memory serves me correctly, but were eaten raw enroute!). Behind the shed we found some plants we'd never seen before: a choko vine creeping way up high, then a custard apple tree. Unfortunately they weren't fruiting at the time. I'd love to have seen what the girls thought of a custard apple.

By the clothesline was an orange tree next to a cluster of banana and pawpaw plants and underneath the clothes drying on the line were a couple of rows of young cabbages. Certainly there is no fertile space wasted on this suburban block! A couple of bunches of cavendish were being propped up as they ripened on the banana plants. The pawpaws were laden with fruit quite high up on the tree. Later I would dream of Grandy trying to get the fruit down with some long lopping tool and a big ripe pawpaw splatted on his head. He was ok though in case you are wondering.

Under these trees was where Juliette discovered the most massive butternut pumpkin I had ever seen. Grandad let her pick it and she was so proud of it she wanted to take it home. Thankfully Grandy found her a more suitably sized kent pumpkin to take home, because we never would have fit that butternut in the boot with Buddy and all our bags.

Rounding back to the front yard where we began our journey we found a passionfruit vine behind the greenhouse with its beautiful orchids in bloom. When we tallied up all of the edible things we had come across, we came up with 17. We thought that was a very productive garden and something Grandad could be very proud of.


**** May 2010....

Launceston, Tasmania. Winter is approaching fast here and the plants are losing their leaves, preparing to close down for the long cold that lie ahead. As I type up this little story from a couple of years ago I find myself inspired to want to plant an edible garden here. Guess we'll ride out the winter and see if the urge is still there when spring comes around.