There’s nothing better than the burst of flavour you get from vegetables fresh from your very own garden. Crunching down on crops you grew yourself is rewarding and a few expert tips from horticulture and environment teacher Stuart Burns will help you start your gardening journey on solid ground this spring.
Position your patch
When starting out, ensure your planting area gets plenty of sunlight, particularly if you are planting on a balcony.
“You can’t grow veggies particularly well, without about six to eight hours of sunlight a day, so let there be light,” Stuart says.
“Coming into the warmer months, this should be pretty achievable for people with a backyard and so long as it’s not a south-facing balcony, you should still be able to grow something.”
Choose easy to grow plants
Some veggies are easier to grow than others. Herbs such as basil and oregano and leafy greens such as lettuce and silverbeet are more likely to reward you for your hard work.
“The world’s most popular home-grown vegetable is the tomato and there’s a good reason for that,” Stuart says.
“Home-grown tomatoes are delicious, they’re pretty easy to grow and they have a productive, long season. There’s also not a huge amount of pests and diseases with those.”
Wait until the time is right
Wait at least until the end of September to plant your summer vegetable seeds in the ground. Spring is the right time for planting pumpkin, tomato, eggplant, chilli, capsicum, zucchini, cucumber and beans.
“If you’re planting while there are still cold days, start them off inside or somewhere warm because it is still a bit cold to put them out.”
Seeds are hiding in your kitchen
Another great tip from Stuart is to plant the vegetables you like to eat, and the seeds you need to get started are probably in your pantry or fridge.
If you fancy a capsicum, chilli, rockmelon or watermelon harvest this summer, you might already have the seeds you need to get started.
“In fact, almost anything you buy with seeds in it will grow. If you buy a pumpkin for example, there’s absolutely no reason you can’t plant the seeds out of the pumpkin and grow more pumpkin,” Stuart says.
“Things like zucchinis and cucumbers don’t get ripe enough to have mature seeds for planting so you can’t use those seeds. One way to tell if seeds will grow is to break one open and see if there is anything inside. If there is, it could probably grow.”
Stuart said if the seed was empty, it probably hadn’t had time to form properly and wasn’t suitable for planting.
“Tomatoes are often hybrids so their seeds might not necessarily grow the same tomato you bought from the shop but it will grow into a tomato of some kind… It’s tomato roulette!”
Remember that primary school experiment where you cut the stop off a carrot and grow it in cotton wool? It turns out, if you leave a carrot top in the ground long enough to flower, you can harvest the seeds from the flower and plant those in your garden to grow new carrots!
“You can do that with onions as well,” Stuart said.
“If you stick a sprouting onion in the ground, you can eat the green spring onions or let them flower and use the seeds. If you buy spring onions and cut the bottoms off, you can plant those and they actually regrow ─ so will leeks.”
Stuart added that the seeds in your spice rack, such as coriander, dill, celery and fennel seeds, were often suitable for planting, as were dried beans.
“There are also a lot of mail order companies out there which deliver seeds that you can order online.”
Friends and foes
Stuart said if you are planting two plants of the same variety, be sure to space them out so they don’t compete for the nutrients in the soil.
“You can grow different types of plants in together a bit. You don’t want to put two tomatoes too close to each other but you can probably put a tomato and a zucchini next to each other.”
Buzz off bugs
You don’t want the bugs to get to your delicious food before you do. Stuart says although there are low-toxicity products on the market, such as pyrethrum spray, a simple soap spray is often the most efficient way to deter insect pests from your garden.
“Aphids are a big problem for a lot of plants and they multiply really quickly but you can actually treat them with a soap spray and that’s really effective,” he says.
“There are a number of recipes around for soap spray. People add chilli and garlic to them but I would keep my chilli and garlic for the cooking!”
It turns out slugs and snails are partial to a beer in the warmer months.
“The old beer trap method works a treat. If you pop some left-over beer in a little dish, the slugs and snails can’t resist the smell and will crawl in.”
Fertiliser facts
The variety of fertilisers available in stores can be confusing for amateur gardeners.
Stuart says ultimately the nutrients in organic and synthetic fertilisers are the same and the plant itself has no preference.
“Organic fertiliser, like animal manure, adds organic matter to the soil, which improves most soils,” he says. “For pot plants synthetic fertilisers are a better choice as they combine better with potting mix.”
What about that home compost or worm casting? Stuart says it adds some nutrients but is limited to the ingredients you put in. “What goes in comes out.”
Watering well
Stuart says it is almost impossible to overwater potted outdoor vegetables because they get hot and thirsty and require daily watering. Likewise, veggies planted in the ground require a lot of water.
“I would tend to water for a long time every other day, than a little bit, every day. The water soaks further into the ground and this encourages the plants to get a deeper root system.”
Finally, Stuart suggests that if you water a little bit every day, your plants will have a shallower root system and dry out more quickly.
This article was originally published in September 2020 and has been updated.
