Vege Gardening

For the last year I’ve enjoyed doing some vege gardening. Previously it was really only my husband who put any effort into the vege growing side of things, but the house we moved into in June 2020 already had four decent-sized raised garden beds, all situated in a readily accessible position. Because of this we were able to get straight into planting come spring!

There is something so satisfying about eating your own home-grown veges. So far we’ve had cherry tomatoes, courgettes (huge ones!), broccoli, sugar snap peas, lettuce, spinach, silverbeet, bok choy, beans, cucumber, chives and various herbs. The basil, mint and sage all really took off and are still growing well despite the cooler weather. The coriander and Italian parsley have helpfully self-seeded, so we should continue to have an abundance of them! Since the vege garden area doesn’t get much sun in wintertime, we decided to leave only a few things growing for now. These include pumpkin, beetroot, spring onions, celery, spinach, broccoli, lettuce and silverbeet. Also the cucumber plant seems to have come back to life but I’m not sure we’ll get anything else from it! We did plant cauliflower too, but so far there has been nothing to show for it.

One of the raised beds was almost totally covered with strawberry plants when we moved in, so we left that and actually got a pretty decent strawberry crop over the summer. We might pare it back a bit though to make room for more veges before next summer. Having fruit growing in your backyard is also so useful for a big family, and we’ve been able to enjoy the lemon, mandarin, tangelo and peach trees we already have – although admittedly the peach tree only produced 3 peaches this year. The peach tree has since been on the receiving end of a severe pruning! This autumn we decided to put in some more citrus trees, plus a guava and two feijoa trees – hopefully this provides us with even more fruit in the coming years!

Sadly I have yet to interest the kids much in the gardening, but they do have some involvement in the watering and harvesting side of things at least – especially when it comes to strawberries. Hopefully they will eventually begin to take an interest in the actual growing and nurturing of plants for food.