Fruit trees & bananas
Citrus, feijoa, plum, peach, cold-hardy banana.
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Around the beds we’re planting an orchard — six fruit trees and three bananas — chosen to suit this place and to give kai across the year.
The fruit trees
Six trees, from three New Zealand nurseries that each know their fruit:
- a plum and a peach from Forgotten Fruits, a family nursery in Mangawhai that grows heirloom varieties bred for Northland’s warm, humid conditions
- a Genoa lemon and a Kawano Satsuma mandarin from Flying Dragon in Kerikeri — the lemon thornless, the mandarin easy-peel and seedless, both good choices for a garden children use
- two feijoa, Unique and Apollo, from The Plant Company, planted as a pair so they cross-pollinate and fruit across a longer window
We chose varieties that do well here and are easy to pick and share: cold-hardy, thornless, seedless where we could, and grown locally where we could.
The bananas
Yes, bananas — cold-hardy ones. Two Misi Luki, the sweet lady-finger banana long grown in Northland, and one Goldfinger, a Honduran variety chosen for cold tolerance and disease resistance. The mix is deliberate: if one struggles in a cold snap, the other carries on.
Bananas sucker and spread. Three well-managed plants become a productive grove for the community within about three years.
When they’ll fruit
The bananas come first, within twelve to eighteen months.