Bush-tucker 5 floors up!

Bush tucker on a balcony garden! As we've travelled Australia I have learned much about indiginous food plants and I was anxious to try some. We’ve been harvesting veggies from our wee eyrie garden - not market-garden proportions but enough to keep us smiling. While we’re on a role, we’ve just replanted with baby rocket, cucumber, rainbow silverbeet, sugar peas, leeks, some lupines to add nitrogen (and colour eventually) and some other eye-candy flowers.  But this time we have branched out and added some drought-tolerant bush tucker to our patch - 'Bower' spinach, appleberry and coastal saltbush from Bili Nursery, Port Melbourne. Oh and not to forget our new passionfruit plants - both black and panama red varieties (the latter to remind us of camping at Hann River crossing on Cape York Peninsula).
Our ‘front’ garden is the veggie patch, but our side garden contains our mini orchard. We have 8 different fruiting trees/bushes/vines - 2 varieties of plum, fig, lemon, lime, 2 appleberry and a rescued passionfruit vine. Plus the mandatory tomatoes and herbs of course.
My experiment this year is with native species and in the fruiting space, the Apple berry, also know as apple dumpling or snot berry - yuk!  Aboriginal names include Karrawang (in Victoria). It is a small shrub or creeping native plant of the Pittosporaceae family and occurs in most states and territories in Australia.
They have bell-shaped yellow-cream flowers with a tinge of purple - or so I believe. I’ll have to wait to see what ours produce! The plant forms oblong berries 2 cm long in summer (next summer for us no doubt!). The fruit may be eaten raw (when ripe!), roasted if still green or preserved as jam. I’ll let you know how they taste.
All we need now is some native bees to help the other insects that buzz around our sky-rise garden. I'm planning to install a B&B for insects; we saw them in Oslo in July this year. We’ll have to put out thinking caps on and do a bit of research - and importantly find a space!

The side garden orchard

All the birds line up to take a dip. The mynas have even learned to take their turn but we have seen them sharing the bath with the doves. Amazing!