In Australia, we have just entered the second month of autumn. This season and the cold winter that follows are a great time to begin thinking about the vegetables you could plant in the spring! If you would like to begin a garden in the spring, or learn more about the garden you already have, The Kitchen Gardener is a great resource.
The Kitchen Gardener by Julian Matthews is packed full of colour pictures and inspiration. It includes a beautiful section on potager gardens, which are designed to be both ornamental and edible! It also contains a section about growing vegetables and herbs in pots, titled “No garden? No problem”. General information about soils and sowing and a “Garden diary” of when to plant are other features. My favourite section of the book is the A-Z guide to vegetable growing. Each vegetable is given a double page spread that includes pictures and information about its nutritional value, suitability for pots, soil needs, seed raising, sowing, spacing, pests and diseases it may be susceptible to, and harvesting.
This book will provide all you need to start out on your adventure in vegetable gardening, and plenty of new ideas to keep you going! In Tasmania, April brings colder weather. We have planted some seeds in the garden: rocket, lettuce, carrots, chives, and beetroot. This is a bit of an experiment to see if they will grow over winter. The climate is mild enough, as it rarely snows in non-mountainous regions. When it becomes too cold to plant anything I intend to spend some extra time studying up on what we can do in the spring.
Happy gardening!
Sherrin, thanks for the book recommendation. We just worked outside yesterday for the first time cleaning up garden debris and getting ready for this year's crop. There's still much to do.
ReplyDeleteI have never heard of rocket. So I just googled it to see what it was. I think I would enjoy the peppery taste in my salads. Very interesting.