RSS

Search

The lawn in front of this trellis is the site I chose for this vegie garden. It has the most sun of anywhere in my backyard (most of which would be too shady). It should also have reasonably good drainage.

A garden fork is used to break up and turn over the earth. I had a compost bin, so some compost from this was used. If you don't have compost, it would be a good idea to add some sort of nutrition to the soil, perhaps a bag of manure, and/or organic fertiliser. My compost bin was a bit on the rotten side, from having too many vegie scraps compared to dry material (like grass clippings), so I gave it a bit of an airing and added some dolomite. The dolomite reduces acidity, which can build up in a bin that gets too rotten.

The soil here seems to be reasonably good, in that it is fairly dark and rich looking. I pulled out clumps of grass that were loosened by the fork, shook the soil from them, and threw them into a plastic bucket. They can go into the compost bin and eventually turn back into fertile soil.

Another view of the newly exposed soil.

Since I had a compost bin, the next thing I did was to throw a few shovel loads of compost onto the top. Then I used the fork to dig the compost in with the rest of the soil.

After turning and leveling the soil, I planted some of the seedlings from my box garden. You could plant the seeds straight into the ground, although they would be susceptible to snail attack. Since seeds don't cost very much, you could experiment with this and see what happends. The plants wilted after being transplanted.

After a couple of days, and some rain. Now the plants are looking quite happy

The climbing beans can grow up the trellis. I left some in the box as an experiment to see which would grow better.

Patch From Scratch & Cottage Gardens, by Peter Cundall and Gardening Australia (DVD). This is a combination of two videos that used to be sold separately on VHS. The "Patch from Scratch" video is really, really good if you want to learn from scratch about how to grow vegetables organically. In Patch from Scratch, Peter Cundall shows you step-by-step how to start a vegetable garden, beginning with an ordinary suburban lawn. He goes through each season (some of then broken into early and late) for 18 months, describing everything in amazing detail. There is so much information in this video you could watch it 100 times and still learn more. The only real criticism of it I can think of is that it is so densely packed with information, your brain gets saturated after 10 or 15 minutes. So don't expect to take it all in in one sitting. I would recommend watching it through all the way just for an introduction, and then watch just the section for each month that you are up to, and do what he explains in that month/season.

Click here to purchase from Australia (Fishpond) $29.99 AUD

Organic Gardening, Peter Bennett. I found this book to be very helpful. It is devoted entirely to organic methods of gardening. Almost all of the book (all of it except for about 5-10 pages) is about food plants rather than flowers or other ornamentals. The back cover states that it is the accepted major work on the subject of growing and cultivating plants in Australia and New Zealand using natural methods.

Click here to purchase from Australia $39.95 AUD

See Also