Vege patch to-do list

This month’s moon calendar, and edible crops to sow and tend now

It’s pretty cold outside this month!

And the seed of most edible crops needs it to be a touch warmer to germinate successfully. In more temperate frostfree areas you can sow brassicas such as broccoli, cabbages and cauliflowers; root crops such as beetroot, swedes, turnips, radishes and carrots; hardy legumes including peas and broad beans; as well as leafy greens such as spinach, silverbeet, lettuces and rocket. In colder places, you can still sow broad beans and peas direct but not much else! But everywhere you can plant your garlic and shallots now if you forgot to last month.

Pop in a few Jerusalem artichokes.

Ideally give them an isolated bed to control their colonising habits. These nutty edible roots appreciate full sun but cope with partial shade, and relatively poor soil. They are easy to grow and in fact, grow so vigorously, you can use them, like potatoes or ‘Daikon‘ radishes, to break up heavy compacted soil.

Get your asparagus beds ready.

Dormant crowns are for sale in garden centres now, but I’d suggest planting in spring (plant now and the roots might rot in the wet winter soil). Asparagus likes rich soil and full sun, so pop your crowns in a tray of damp sawdust or potting mix (they’ll be fine for a few weeks), and dig over the bed where you plan to plant them, adding compost and aged manure, plus a sprinkle of Yates Thrive Natural Blood & Bone. Asparagus is not the most attractive crop, with sprawling ferny foliage, so site the bed out of the way.

There are seedlings to plant now.

Although it’s worth setting out cloches over the spots in which you plan to plant for a few days before you do so, to warm the soil. You can buy fancy bell-shaped glass cloches, but a plastic bottle cut in half works perfectly well! You can plant brassicas, lettuces (red lettuces are more tolerant of winter conditions, but keep them in pots in marginal spots), onions, silverbeet and spinach.

I know winter seems endless!

But take heart, bud burst is only a few weeks away for the earliest stone fruit varieties (at my place, that’s a nectarine and an early peach). So if you’re planning on a winter copper spray, get to it on the next fine, still day. A good coating of copper now, and again at bud burst (aka when you see the first hint of pink), helps prevent problems with many fungal diseases, including the unsightly leaf curl to which stone fruit is prone (especially in humid parts of the country).

Prune fruit trees now for shape.

I often get asked whether you should prune fruit trees in winter or summer, but actually it depends on what you are pruning to achieve. A good rule of thumb to remember is in winter, you are pruning for shape; and in summer, you are pruning for size. So now is a good time to undertake formative pruning – that is, to shape the tree in order to increase your yield and reduce density of branches. Summer is a time to prune if you want to reduce vigorous growth and control a tree’s size.