Thursday, June 28, 2012

Your top ten fruit trees for urban spaces

We’re really excited to have recently been asked to write a guide to growing food in urban areas (backyards, schools, community gardens and apartment gardens) in the Illawarra. The guide will be published as part of the Illawarra Biodiversity and Local Food Strategy for Climate Change project, a joint sustainability project involving Wollongong, Shellharbour and Kiama Councils working together with funding from the NSW Government’s Environmental Trust.
It will have sections on designing and maintaining veggie gardens and food forests, as well as lots of gardening hints and tips, and lovely stories and photos of people growing food locally in all sorts of different places.  
As part of the guide we’re creating a ‘top ten’ list of fruit trees, herbs and veggies to grow in urban environments. And we’d love you’re help! If you had to recommend ten fruit trees for growing on the coast in a subtropical/temperate climate, what would they be? So far our top ten, based on being relatively easy to grow and producing abundant harvests would probably be:
  1. Citrus (all types!)
  2. Banana (Williams Cavendish)
  3. Pawpaw
  4. Peach
  5. Hawaiian Guava
  6. Cherimoya
  7. Jaboticaba
  8. Persimmon
  9. Mulberry
  10. Olive
Looking forward to hearing what your top ten would be!
UPDATE - Sooo....in trying to take into account everyone's super helpful comments, and realising that it's probably a bit cheeky to include the whole citrus family as one fruit tree (though that certainly helped us fit more in our top ten!), our revised top ten list is, in no particular order:
  1. Orange
  2. Mandarin
  3. Banana (Williams Cavendish)
  4. Pawpaw
  5. Macadamia
  6. Hawaiian Guava
  7. Cherimoya
  8. Passionfruit
  9. Persimmon
  10. Mulberry

Thanks so much for your help everyone

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