Your Asian Veggie Patch sets out the essentials for your garden

A new guide to growing your own veggies is a delight with its comprehensive guide to growing, harvesting and storing more than 50 Asian vegetables, herbs and fruits.

Connie Cao: the author of Your Asian Veggie Patch. Picture: Alicia Taylor

Among the plethora of books on growing your own produce, a few stand out. Your Asian Veggie Patch by Connie Cao (Murdoch Books, $40) is one of these for its accuracy, clarity and detail. Plus, it’s a fun read and has easy, home-style recipes.

The Melbourne-based permaculture gardener and photographer, pictured above, draws on her heritage in this comprehensive guide to growing, harvesting and storing more than 50 Asian vegetables, herbs and fruits. Sensibly, she divides these according to the season they’re grown.

Your Asian Veggie Patch by Connie Cao includes easy-to-follow information for beginners

Cool-season plants include Asian mustards, bok choy, Chinese broccoli, chrysanthemum greens and snow peas; warm-season options include chillies, eggplants, long bean, water spinach, melons and squashes. Many of the herbs are ones you’ll want to grow, such as ginger, turmeric and galangal, pandan, shiso and lemongrass.

There’s easy-to-follow information for beginners on essentials such as sunlight, soil, fertilising, watering and seed raising, all with an organic approach.

Home Made

Even if you only have a small space to work with, there’s plenty of inspiration from this lovely book.

Ping Tung Long eggplant

Oyster mushrooms

These healthy veg show what you can do with limited garden space.

Celtuce

Shark fin melons.

Q&A

Will cypress pine sawdust, combined with chook manure, be good for my garden? It’s marketed as resistant to white ants, so will it deter beneficial microbes?

Lyn Stiller, Tannum Sands, Queensland

Cypress pine is slow to break down and as a mulch is less attractive to termites, but the fungi in soil are able to break it down. Fresh sawdust or bark will contain tannins that inhibit plant growth but these dissipate when composted for at least three months. Adding high-nitrogen chook poo counteracts the high carbon content of woody materials, speeding composting. Keep the heap moist. Sawdust, having fine particles, can easily clump into an impenetrable layer that prevents water and oxygen reaching the soil; apply a thin layer only.

A cassava cutting I was given in winter has “struck”. How do I grow it so I can harvest and propagate cassava?

Marcus Gunaratnam, by email

Cassava is easy to grow, especially in the tropics; in cooler climates it dies down in winter and doesn’t tolerate frost. Cuttings should be from plants known to have sweet tubers. Plant yours out now, allowing for a 1m spread and 3m height. Harvest the long, starchy, edible tubers six to ten months after planting, usually by digging up the whole plant. Keep planting new cuttings of 2.5cm diameter and up to 30cm long, taken any time; place 10cm deep, directly into garden beds.

I sprayed the curling leaves on my two plum trees with Yates Leaf Curl spray but I think it stopped some of the growth.

Mohammad Sharfuddin, Queanbeyan, NSW

This product is for a fungal problem, peach leaf curl, that only affects peaches and nectarines, not plums, and it must be sprayed preventively at leaf bud swell. If the mix you sprayed was too strong, it could have affected growth. In plums, leaf curl is usually from aphids, a pest that sucks sap on young leaves so they become distorted as they unfurl. Spray with Eco-Neem, horticultural soap or pyrethrum.

Send your questions to [e-mail]. The best question for November wins the writer’s choice of nature-inspired cushion covers or pillowcases from WA artist Barbara O’Donovan to the value of $150 plus postage. barbaraodonovandesign.com.au

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