The Incredible Edible Oasis

Why wait to retire to an acreage when you can create a productive paradise on a suburban block?

- Claire Bickle

When Kylie and Steve Stapleton decided to turn their garden in Brisbane’s northern suburbs into an edible forest, one of the first trees they planted was carambola, also known as starfruit — so naturally they named their little piece of paradise The Green Carambola.

The Southeast Asian native isn’t the only tropical exotic growing in profusion on their 612sqm block. There’s also black sapote — a South American persimmon sometimes called chocolate pudding fruit — and New Guinea bean, which is neither from New Guinea nor a bean but a vigorous African climber that produces a long, pale-green gourd somewhere between a squash and a zucchini.

This so-called bottle gourd, a cucurbit also called calabash and used in West Africa to make eating utensils and musical instruments, shares space with a massive passionfruit vine on a trellis that Steve built.

Marginally more familiar are dragon fruit, blueberries, pawpaw, low-chill peaches, the prolific ‘Panama Gold’ passionfruit and ‘Dwarf Cavendish’ bananas.

Among the non-fruit items are several varieties of beans (including sword beans), peas, okra, corn, tomatoes (OK, that’s a fruit), cabbages, parsley, garlic and a few varieties of sweet potatoes.

The couple wish they had space for even more fruit trees but, while still working fulltime, they find the space is more than enough to look after. Their dream is one day to have a hobby farm on an acreage — but in the meantime they thought, “Why wait?”

THE GARDENING BUG