An expert’s easy guide to growing your edible summer garden

An Expert’s Easy Guide to Growing Your Edible Summer Garden

Cultivate your own delicious backyard food empire. Audrey Hepburn, the iconic film star known for her 1950s and 60s chic and her pet fawn, loved growing plants. She once said, “To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.” As we navigate life during Covid, growing and harvesting our own food gives us a wonderful sense of control over our lives. Plus, there’s nothing more satisfying than the fresh, green smell of a newly picked tomato or watering your garden on a summer evening while snacking on beans straight from the vine.

November: The Promise of Summer

November is one of the prettiest months in the garden and full of promise, as it’s the eve of summer when soil temperatures are finally warm enough for heat-loving crops like tomatoes, cucumbers, and capsicums to thrive.

Do Your Groundwork

Before planting or sowing, remember that fruiting summer edibles like tomatoes and beans need at least six hours of full sun a day. Crops that love heat, such as eggplants, need around eight hours. If your garden is partially shaded, leafy vegetables like lettuce, silverbeet, and kale can cope with less sunlight. If your only sunny spot is a patio, grow sun-loving vegetables in pots there. Just make sure you provide them with a decent-sized pot with good-quality potting mix that includes a wetting agent.

If you’re planning to grow vegetables in the garden or in raised beds, enrich your soil with lots of organic matter first. This ensures plants have a nutrient-dense diet of minerals and nurtures the ecosystem of microorganisms in your soil, which will, in turn, feed your plants. Compost is an excellent start, but keep in mind that it’s a soil conditioner rather than a growing medium. If you’re filling raised beds, aim for two-thirds compost with one-third plant mix (choose a vegetable-specific one) on top. Add well-aged manure, such as sheep pellets, and if you like, a fertilizer like blood and bone. If you’re digging a new vegetable garden in your lawn, your soil will already be rich in nitrogen from the grass.

Seeds or Seedlings?

At this time of year, most crops can be grown from seed as well as from seedlings. However, it’s better to start with seedlings for crops like watermelon and eggplant, which need a long, hot summer to produce fruit. Although sowing from seed means you can grow a wider range of plant varieties than are available at the garden center, if you only want three or four of each type of edible, you’re better off buying seedlings rather than a packet of 50 seeds that might not be viable in a year’s time.

Water is Life

Thirsty summer crops will stop growing during long dry periods without water and are more susceptible to pests. Unless you have a drip-feeder installed, water your vegetable garden deeply two to three times a week rather than frequent shallow waterings. You want to wet more than the top layer of soil, encouraging plants to send their roots down deeper to access the moisture rather than developing shallow root systems, which make them less resilient. Pots, on the other hand, require daily watering as they dry out quickly. Set a reminder on your phone if you struggle to remember. Consider installing a rainwater-harvesting system so you’re utilizing a free resource rather than draining local water supplies during droughts.

Meet Your New BFF: Mulch

Just as soil is covered by leaf litter or plants in nature, garden soil shouldn’t be bare either. Mulch locks moisture into the soil and prevents it from drying out. A variety of materials can be used as mulch, but in the vegetable garden, some of the best options are pea straw, a thin layer of grass clippings, or wilted weeds (remove any flowers so they don’t drop seeds). Pea straw is an ideal mulch for vegetable gardens, particularly raised beds, which dry out quickly in the heat. When watering, direct the water at the base of a plant and try not to splash the leaves.

Or plant a living mulch of flowering plants around your crops, such as calendula, comfrey, and borage. They’ll cover the soil and attract pollinators. Always water your garden well before laying mulch so you’re not locking in dryness, and leave a couple of centimeters between mulch and plant stems to prevent them from rotting.

For more information, visit The Old Farmer’s Almanac.