If you want homegrown vegies this summer, it’s time to get gardening

New rhubarb leaves are unfurling, broad beans are fattening, mulberries are ripening and coriander is bolting. Growing things to eat reaches a whole new level of activity in mid-spring.

Now that we are moving into the most prolific time of year for edibles – the very months when you can easily find yourself with more produce than you know what to do with – food growers need to get gardening.

Tomatoes and zucchinis are standard summer fare.Credit: iStock

It’s the season for sowing seeds and building up your soil with homemade compost. Now is the time for weeding, planting and then planting some more.

By mid-October, soils are starting to get warm enough for seedlings to survive out in the open, where they can soak up all the goodness of a lively soil and direct sunlight.

The trickiest part can be choosing what to grow because if you start buying six-pack punnets of little seedlings that need to be placed 50 centimetres apart, before you know it you are running out of room. Most of us can’t find the space for everything we want to eat.

“One of the most important things we need to do is prioritise,” writes Connie Cao in her new book Your Asian Veggie Patch: A guide to growing and cooking delicious Asian vegetables, herbs and fruits. True to her theme, she discusses alternatives to the standard tomatoes-and-zucchinis summer backyard fare.

How to grow the likes of long beans, shark fin melon, choko, loofahs and yuzu is the focus of this book. While some of the plants she profiles (ginger and turmeric, for example) are relatively easily grown in Sydney, Cao outlines how gardeners in Melbourne can create sufficiently warm microclimates by using sunny brick walls or greenhouses.

She also details how Asian foods that are frost-sensitive need to be dug up to harvest and those that are invasive lend themselves to container growing.

But if it’s Australian edibles you’re leaning towards, Mindy Woods details everything from saltbush and callistemon to banksia and Geraldton wax in her new book Karkalla at Home: Native foods & everyday recipes for connecting to country.

You won’t find many of the native trees, shrubs and climbers she discusses in the productive section of your local nursery but Woods, who has a much-lauded restaurant in Byron Bay, gives recipes (think paperbark ice cream, lemon myrtle mayo and wattleseed espresso martini) showing how well they lend themselves to the kitchen.

Ginger and turmeric are relatively easy to grow.Credit: iStock

In the garden, many of the plants she talks about can be grown year-round without expressly designed “edible beds”.

And when it comes to edible beds, there is no one-size-fits-all approach anyway. The trick is to find what works for your space and the sort of food you want to grow. As with all aspects of gardening, looking at what other people do is a rich source of ideas.

You will see formal edible beds edged in Dutch box, seasonal vegetables in raised timber planters and potted herbs deliberately positioned near kitchens in the Hawthorn gardens open for this year’s National Gallery of Victoria Women’s Association (NGVWA) Garden Day, which takes place on Thursday, October 24.

You can also look at how native edibles are being grown on an Indigenous rooftop farm above Sydney’s South Eveleigh precinct, which is open to the public from 12pm to 2pm weekdays.

And for the most accessible inspiration of all, always keep your eyes peeled for the front gardens, street gardens and community gardens you pass. Invariably you will glean new information.

Not everything you see will work for your space and your climate. Your garden might be too exposed for citrus, too cool for bananas or too boggy for olives, for example. Whatever your weak spots, best not to persist but to instead embrace what will readily thrive and provide abundant yields.

And as for plants that are bolting to seed as the weather warms, embrace that too. As Cao writes: “Letting your plants flower at this time of year helps to attract pollinators ... in turn, the pollinators help you by pollinating your veggies.”

But don’t get complacent. While seedlings of tomatoes, capsicums, eggplants and other cold-sensitive crops will never do as well if they are transplanted into the garden too early, leave it too late and you will only delay yields.

If you want summer produce, get moving now.

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