For the love of pod
Sow broad beans, peas and leafy crops
Traditionalists sow broad beans on Anzac Day, but any time this month is fine.
Peas – dwarf, climbing and sugar snap – can go in now too; they like the cooler weather. Sow a row or two of miner’s lettuce, spinach, silverbeet and perennial rocket, as well as carrots and beetroot. They will develop woody cores if you leave them to overwinter in frozen soil, so harvest them in 8-10 weeks and scoff them as tender baby veges.
Sow Chinese cabbages now – they’ll also be ready to eat in as little as two months if autumn conditions are favourable. Just protect them from any white cabbage butterflies still about.
It’s too late to sow the much slower-growing non-Asian brassicas such as cabbages, cauliflowers and brussels sprouts, though you can plant seedlings now – but again, you’ll need to watch out for those pesky white butterflies.
Fancy a cottage garden next spring?
Well now’s the time to sow many spring and summer-flowering annuals and perennials. There’s a far wider choice of varieties if you sow your own and it’s far cheaper than buying plants next spring.
Autumn is a good time to sow wallflowers, cornflowers, lobelia, nemesia, sweet peas, penstemon, dianthus, aquilegia, pansies, violas and primulas. Oriental poppies have large ruffled blooms in pink, red and orange. They tolerate most soils if the drainage is good.
Large-grade delphiniums can be expensive in spring. Plant seed now and they’ll flower in early November; deadhead and they’ll bloom again in February. Look for ‘‘Dwarf Fountains Mix’’ (Egmonts Seeds) for a wide range of pink, mauve, blue and purple flowers on stocky plants, ‘‘Pacific Giants Mix’’ for the back of the border and as cut flowers or ‘‘Shogun Mix F1 Hybrid’’ with very strong stems that don’t require staking.
Autumn is the perfect time to compost
For good compost you need about three times as much carbon-rich ‘‘brown’’ matter (that’s fallen leaves, straw, paper, cardboard and aged sawdust) as you need nitrogen-rich, or green, material (fruit and vege scraps, grass clippings, fresh manure and green waste).
It can be a struggle to get the ratio right. If you have a surplus of green and not enough brown, your compost gets wet, slimy and smelly. Stockpile brown material now while autumn leaves are in such abundance. Gather leaves as soon as possible after they fall from the tree – if they sit around the nitrogen starts to leach out. Also, as leaves dry out, the polymer lignin, which helps conduct water, hardens, so it’s harder for the nutrients in the leaf to be transmitted to the soil.
A quick way to collect leaves on the lawn is to run a mower over them. Use a catcher – each load will be a perfect brown/green mix of shredded leaves and grass clippings.
Or just pile the leaves into a black plastic bag, poke a few holes in it with your garden fork and pop it somewhere out of sight for a few months and it will break down into a rich black leaf mould.