Food Forest Journey

The journal

Mount Charlton, QLDworked and lived, 2024–2026

The Organic Banana Farm

Every other garden on this route is a place I was invited to work. This one is where I learned how. Nearly two years on a commercial organic banana farm, and the reason I can read a monsoonal subtropical site at all.

Rows of banana plants below rainforest ranges with low cloud, Mount Charlton

Not a client project, but where most of my subtropical growing came from. Close to two years living and working on an organic banana farm in the ranges behind Mackay.

The place itself
A rainbow arching over a block of banana plants with forested ranges behind
Mount CharltonA full arc over the bananas, with the ranges behind.

2 entries, newest first.

Residence

Eighteen months of nearly everything

I came back to the Mackay region on 6 October 2024, and the farm became my main agricultural base for most of the next year and a half. This is the stretch that taught me the most, because almost none of it was planting.

Vanilla. The vines (Vanilla spp.) were flowering when I returned, and I learned to hand-pollinate them — every single flower, individually, by hand. The pods ripened on the vine and were later harvested, blanched and sun-cured.

Flower to pod
A single pale yellow vanilla orchid flower open on the vine
18 Oct 2024 · 08:28One flower, open for a single day. Miss it and that pod never sets.
A vanilla vine in flower with several blooms and a cluster of unopened buds among thick green leaves
18 Oct 2024 · 08:33A length of vine carrying several at once, with the next buds coming behind.
Two batches of cured vanilla pods laid out on a pale tarpaulin in the sun
After the curePods out in the sun, the darker lot further along than the lighter.

Waste as a resource. There was a constant volume of surplus and unsaleable bananas (Musa spp.) to compost, which returned a lot of organic matter to the ground. Spent mushroom blocks from a growing facility on the property went in as well. Composting was never a side task here; it was a daily part of running the place.

Back to the heap
Hundreds of green and yellow bananas spread across a large mound of dark compost at the edge of a paddock
14 Oct 2024Surplus and unsaleable fruit out on the heap. There is a run of it every week, and all of that organic matter goes back into the ground.

Adding value. I kept going to market every week and started making the promotional material for it. Surplus bananas became banana syrup, then green banana flour from the green seconds, then dehydrated banana through a solar dehydrator. Mango season in November brought a large crop (Mangifera indica), most of it processed and preserved and the rest composted. Turmeric (Curcuma longa) came out of the ground in quantity and went back out as turmeric powder.

At the market
A market stall table stacked with ripe and green bananas early in the morning, under a banner for a certified organic grower
7 Dec 2024 · 06:36Mackay Farmers Market as the sun was rising.
What the surplus became
Rows of halved bananas drying on a mesh tray inside a glass-topped solar dehydrator
The solar dehydratorHalved bananas drying under glass in the sun.
A person in a wide-brimmed hat holding a large bowl of pale dried green banana slices
Green banana flourGreen seconds sliced and dried, ready to be milled into flour.

The market garden. This one was a collective effort with the banana farm tribe, in a large fenced area, though I dug most of the rows by hand with a mattock. As it came on, the market stall diversified well beyond bananas. Over December and January it produced a serious crop of eggplant (Solanum melongena), which is how I learned to make baba ghanoush.

The beds, coming on
Mulched garden beds planted with young corn and brassicas, banana plants and a peak beyond
Newly plantedBeds built up and mulched, with corn and brassicas just away. Bananas behind the fence line, and the ranges behind that.
Dense garden beds with flowering nasturtiums, tomatoes and sprawling pumpkin vines in a valley
Later in the seasonNasturtiums through the tomatoes and pumpkin running over the edge of a bed.

Propagation and study. I was working through a Certificate III in Horticulture and applying it directly: raising seedlings in my nursery, propagating pineapple (Ananas comosus) and bush-tucker species, and beginning to learn grafting — eggplant onto a devil's fig rootstock (Solanum spp.). Holy basil (Ocimum tenuiflorum) grew vigorously and I sun-dried the leaves. Jaboticaba (Plinia spp.) flowered and then fruited. Papayas (Carica papaya) planted earlier came into heavy production, and I put a good deal of turmeric in alongside an established row of them.

Papaya and jackfruit
A ripe papaya cut lengthwise into two halves, deep orange flesh around a bed of black seeds
PapayaOne out of my own garden, cut open.
A jackfruit cut in half and held up, bright yellow bulbs inside, more fruit hanging on the tree behind
JackfruitOpened under the tree it came off, with the next ones still hanging behind.

And the rest of it. Jackfruit (Artocarpus heterophyllus) and dragon fruit (Selenicereus spp.) in season. A large pigeon pea (Cajanus cajan) harvest. Multicoloured sweet corn. Cotton (Gossypium spp.) grown from seed, which formed bolls and gave me seed back. A new banana circle of plantain varieties late in November, fenced with scrap wire against the wallabies, and another on 18 February 2025 — ground broken, packed with banana trash and planted before dark. Ducks that wandered over from a neighbouring property and decided to stay. Snakes in the plantation during harvest, often enough to stop being remarkable.

Pigeon pea
Orange pea flowers and dark buds on a pigeon pea bush, a green pod forming behind them
27 Jul 2024 · 17:44In flower, with a pod already setting behind it.
A bowl held up full of dried tan pigeon pea seeds
The cropPodded and dried, a bowl at a time.
Building a banana circle
A circle of freshly dug soil heaped in a grass paddock with banana leaves laid around it
18 Feb 2025 · 17:02Ground broken and the spoil heaped up, with the leaf laid out around it.
A planted banana circle with young plants around a ring of banana-leaf mulch packed into the centre
18 Feb 2025 · 18:17Seventy-five minutes later: four plants in around the ring, the middle packed with banana trash and the whole thing mulched.
The other residents
A large white waterbird standing over several ducklings foraging on bare ground, another duck in the foreground
They stayedDucklings turning over the ground, with the adults standing watch.
Ducks and a dozen ducklings spread across a food forest understorey with papaya trees behind
Through the food forestThe whole lot of them working the understorey, papaya behind.
A slender brown snake coiled in the crown of a cut banana bunch beside a green tree frog
7 Mar 2025 · 08:00A snake curled into the crown of a cut bunch, sharing it with a green tree frog. Eight in the morning.
A huntsman spider crouched over a white silk egg sac on a hand of green bananas
21 Mar 2025 · 08:39A huntsman over her egg sac, holding her ground on a hand of fruit.

Heavy monsoonal rain and significant flooding came through at the start of January. That is the part people outside the region underestimate: here the wet is not a season you work around, it is the thing that sets what is possible.

I left the farm on 25 April 2026 and moved to Kuttabul.

Arrival

A market run, then a place to live

This started as a lift. From June 2024 I was helping take the farm's bananas (Musa spp.) to the Airlie Beach market each Saturday. On those early-morning drives the senior farmer who was handing the market over passed on decades of practical knowledge, introduced me to his regular customers, and gradually left the weekly run to me. It is the best apprenticeship I have had, and it happened in a ute before sunrise.

On 28 July 2024 I moved onto the farm itself. We built a fireplace out of rocks gathered off the land. Not long after, I started on the banana harvest, and by August I was properly in the work.

Banana harvest
Dozens of green banana bunches laid out on a large circular bench in a farm shed, a tractor behind
HarvestBunches in off the plantation and onto the bench.
A person carrying a whole bunch of green bananas balanced on one shoulder in the plantation
Off the plantA whole bunch comes out of the row on your shoulder.
Cut bunches of green bananas stacked on a tarpaulin-lined trailer between rows of banana plants
Out in the rowsCut bunches stacked along the trailer, where the work actually happens.

I began a small food forest around where I was living — somewhere to apply what I was learning and to run a diverse perennial system alongside a commercial monoculture and watch how differently the two behave.

Around September I helped establish a market garden, with cosmos (Cosmos spp.), amaranth (Amaranthus spp.) and daikon radish (Raphanus sativus var. longipinnatus) among the recorded plantings. I also started flying a drone over the plantations across the different paddocks, which gave an overhead record of the layout and a way of reading the farm at landscape scale rather than row by row.

Toward the end of September I planted a great many sunflowers (Helianthus annuus) along a swale, and then left for a stay down south.

Reading the farm from above
Aerial view along a forested valley, a creek curling around cleared paddocks and plantation blocks with ranges and low cloud beyond
From the droneThe whole of it: the creek round both sides, the blocks on the flat, and the range it all sits under. Row by row you see a crop; from up here you see where the water goes.