Urban Food Forest Garden Yields, Three Years In

Here are the annual garden yield figures for Oct 2010–Oct 2011, the garden’s third year.

The annual production for this garden was 131kg in the first year, 202kg in the second year and 194kg in the third year (as a consequence of a minor disaster!).

The total garden bed area is 686 sq. feet (64 sq. metres).

The average monthly amount of produce was just over 14kg.

Here are some statistics which break this down further:

Year Three Overview

This graph is colour-coded for season – yellow (summer), orange (autumn), brown (winter) and green (spring).

The most significant anomaly is the “flat spot” in August; this happens when you get seriously ill, are confined to bed, and can’t harvest anything for a month. Things like this really do happen in a real-life garden!

If we look at the monthly production figures:

Yields Per Month (grams)

	2008	2009	2010
Jan	22,203	6,385	14,769
Feb	10,860	13,891	9,478
Mar	11,018	16,700	20,813
Apr	3,748	49,056	15,413
May	15,566	28,277	5,304
Jun	11,251	40,136	39,995
Jul	14,341	3,085	44,176
Aug	4,128	21,804	–
Sep	11,155	846	4,426
Oct	11,252	19,351	20,393
Nov	6,149	1,170	9,542
Dec	9,556	1,274	10,067
Total	133,235	203,984	194,376
Monthly Average	10,936	16,831	14,018

Weather Disasters and Harvest Losses

This year was fraught with disasters, mostly weather related, so we’ve fared pretty well considering…

Previously, Cyclone Yasi struck Australia – this category 5 tropical cyclone hit North Queensland on February 3, 2011 and caused major disruptions to the weather further south here in Melbourne. As a result, our weather changed from a hot, dry Mediterranean summer to a hot, wet, tropical one.

To quote a previous article report:

We experienced an unseasonably wet spring and an early summer, which then made way for cold weather, and then reverted back to summer heat. If that wasn’t bad enough, for the first time we’ve experienced what you’d call tropical weather, a period of very hot weather with continuous rain.

The result was pretty much a disaster for people growing food. It was reported in the news that the weather “…took its toll on cherries, table grapes, strawberries, stone-fruit and wine grapes, which have suffered cracking, splitting, marking, softening, fruit drop and disease outbreaks.”

In Victoria, commercial growers lost up to one-third of their early season stone-fruit and wine grape growers expect to lose one-fifth of their yields because they experienced the worst downy mildew outbreak in 20 years. they only managed to rescue their harvests by extensively spraying with fungicides!

It’s fairly easy to calculate the harvest losses for this year.

Stone fruit – I counted 52 full sized nectarines and 38 full sized peaches rotting on the ground under the trees. If I very conservatively estimate the weight of these fruit at 100 grams, we are talking about 9 kg of stone fruit.

Grapes – there were over 9kg produced last year, and the grape vine has been steadily increasing its harvest. If we once again conservatively assume that it would have produced at least as much as it did the year before, then that’s 9kg of grapes.

Tomatoes – since there was virtually no summer this year, expectedly, tomato yields reduced from 15kg last year to 8.5kg this year, so that’s a loss of over 6kg of tomatoes.

There were other losses, such as other vegetables, cherries, about three weeks worth of raspberries, but I won’t bother counting this for now.

If I add up our figures for lost harvest, 9kg of stone fruit, 9kg of grapes and 6 kg of tomatoes adds up to a severely underestimated harvest loss of 24kg. If I add this figure to the harvest total, 24+194=218kg, which would have been 14kg more than last years harvest figure at the very least, but hey, this is the real world, and disasters do happen.

Essentially, this represents a 4.7% loss in harvest, but from a more positive perspective, it shows that the garden design is rather resilient and we were able to harvest 95.3% of our usual amount of produce even with a major disastrous weather change. I’ll count myself lucky that I have a biodiverse food forest, unlike the commercial monocultures, where commercial growers lost up to one-third of their early season stone-fruit. That’s the benefit of polyculture vs. monoculture folks!

Breakdown by Produce Type

If we break down the figures by type of produce (fruits, vegetables and berries), we can see the how much produce we got in each of these categories.

Fruit	Yield (g)
apple	8,264
apricots	220
babaco	8,666
cherry guava	151
feijoa	218
fig	8,643
grapefruit	5,120
lemon	10,029
lemon guava	207
lime	165
mandarin	42,954
mulberry	2,123
orange	3,203
pepino	6,839
plum	12,651
pomegranate	6,680
rockmelon	773
sloe berry	341
total	117,247
2009 total	127,723
2008 total	53,636

This year, fruit production decreased by almost 8%. This decrease is expected, as unseasonal weather wiped out all the grapes, cherries, and stone fruit. The biggest contributing factor though was a major pruning of the pomegranate tree, last year it produced 47kg, this year it only produced less than 7kg, but then again, more than 2/3 of the tree was pruned away! I have planted a few new fruit trees, so many are still young and haven’t established themselves yet. My pear trees are now three years old and might produce their first fruit this year. It appears fruit trees take around five years to establish and give reasonable yields, andyields increase progressively from year to year as the trees mature.

Berries	Yield (g)
blackberry	26
blackcurrant	15
goji berry	64
raspberry	5,687
redcurrant	236
strawberry	1,088
total	7,116
2009 total	4,021
2008 total	2,584

The berries’ performance is outstanding again this year, as it waslast year. Last year yields have increased by 56%, this year they increased by a whopping 77%. These berries I added last year – youngberries, thornless blackberries, loganberries, thornless gooseberries, black currants, red currants and golden currants are growing well. I’ve added a few more this year, some boysenberries, silvanberries, lawtonberries and marionberries! I’m expecting next year’s berry harvests to be phenomenal!

Vegetables	Yield (g)
broad beans	20,267
cauliflower	553
chilli	473
climbing beans	47
edible canna	760
eggplant	764
jerusalem artichoke	9,400
kale	220
lettuce	536
loofah	846
potato	2,501
pumpkin	1,917
rhubarb	1,199
silverbeet	1,700
sweet corn	1,954
tomato	10,056
water chestnut	1,115
yacon	15,705
total	70,013
2009 total	70,231
2008 total	75,052

This year I actually got the same amount of vegetables as the year before- that’s 70kg- even though I couldn’t harvest anything for a whole month, being bedridden with a bad fever. I forgot to harvest nearly all of my potatoes (they re-sprouted after being left too long in the soil!) and most of the annual vegetables ‘bolted’ and went to seed after we had two or three extremely hot days during a very mild spring.

Yield Per Acre: How Does It Compare?

So, I’m really producing 70kg of vegetables a year without really trying…

To put these yield statistics in perspective, we measure production in yield/acre.

• One acre = 4,047 sq. metres
• My garden = 64 sq. metres
• Gardens per acre: 4,047 ÷ 64 = 63.23
• Best yield to date: 202 kg × 63.23 = 12,773 kg/acre (~12.77 metric tonnes/acre)
• Without harvest losses: 218 kg × 63.23 = 13,784 kg/acre (~13.78 metric tonnes/acre)

So, my 3-year-old garden that is just getting started is producing the equivalent of 12,773kg/acre, in other words, close to 12.77 metric tonnes per acre!

Now that I’ve added a few more trees – a mango, another babaco, a persimmon, and another half dozen varieties of berries, I’m curious to see how the garden will perform over the next two years, even in adverse weather conditions.

Looking Ahead

Also, in case people missed this, this garden is completely organic; no pesticides were used this year. I’ve used a bare touch of organic neem horticultural soap or white oil in previous years, but absolutely none was required this year. Fertiliser was provided courtesy of my three worm farms and five compost bins, and a few bags of sheep manure to replace the nutrients lost from the produce I give away!

The fruit trees are starting to fruit again as summer arrives; the berries are growing vigorously, and by all appearances,.. it’s promising to be better than ever this coming year!