When I initially decided to plant a living canopy over a section of my veggie garden, my main thoughts were to create a bit of shade with living plants in stead of expensive synthetic shade cloths, and I decided to do so by making use of plants that I could add to my list of plants producing food for the farm.
So far, the plan is working perfectly, I have decent shade over a huge patch of my vegetable garden where I now intend to plant some of the more sun shy vegetables under.
The canopy itself is doing extremely well and hanging exceptionally heavy with new fruit. I have been harvesting fruits daily for the past three days as they ripen and I still have not made a dent in what the canopy has to offer.
So far the entire family has pretty much had their fill of these delicious fruits, and as from tomorrow - I will start collecting the pulp from these amazing fruits and bottling that for a few of my clients in the baking industry, whatever fruits I am left with by this weekend will be shipped off to the local farmers market on Saturday to be sold there.
On the canopy I planted a mixture of two different cultivars of passionfruit - one being the Ester the purple fruit you can see above, As well as the pawpawdilla - the yellow passion fruit in the picture below.
Although these fruit are both from the Passiflora_edulis family, there are distinct differences in the tastes of these two fruits, and these subtle aromatic differences are what makes them unique. The yellow fruit has a sweeter more rounded taste and is less tart and strong than its purple counterpart - however they are both equally delicious.
But other than providing us with a magnitude of daily fresh fruit, it has created quite an amazing eco-system of its own, below you can see one of the magnificently unique passion flowers from which these fruits stem. Not only are they really beautiful, but they also attract a plethora of beneficial insects such as butterflies and bees that are needed in the pollination of all the plants in the vegetable garden and the surrounds, allowing us to grow food on the farm successfully.
But here is another really interesting find in the canopy section, I found quite a few large wasp nests hanging from the bottom of the canopy, my initial thought was to remove them, out of fear of getting stung, but then I saw some monkeys the next morning trying to get to the fruit, and I noticed that the wasps were actually serving as a security system - as soon as the monkeys start rattling the canopy as the scavenge around the wasps would promptly hone in and attack the monkeys forcing them to find another food source...
By leaving them in tact - I get to harvest fruits that the monkeys would otherwise have wasted, that is as long as I don't disturb the wasps myself...