The last few days have been so very salubrious in our garden! Cooler temperatures gave us the best indication yet that autumn is just around the corner. Yippee!
And Friday was the perfect transplanting day - cool, overcast with a bit of drizzle and the occasional shower. Amongst the seedlings Jye and I transplanted were our first cabbage and cauliflower for 2026! The planting of these heat averse crops really indicates to us the change of season.
Right now for us gardeners on the mid‑north coast, it’s time to tidy‑up our waning summer crops, and plant new crops more suited to the cooler months ahead. Some summer crops like tomatoes, capsicum, eggplant, cucs, basil, etc. will continue producing for a while, so no reason to pull them out unless disease has got hold of them. And let’s clean up the summer weeds, before they set seed, and add them to the compost pile (that I’m sure you are turning regularly :).
Now is also a great time to top up our garden beds with compost or well‑rotted manure and lightly incorporate into the soil. We recently got a truck and trailer load of compost and are adding it to each bed before we put a new crop in. This compost will feed the soil microbes well into the winter, sustain the plants during the cooler months, and then fire new growth in the spring.
Now is also a great time to sow a green manure crop in empty beds to improve the soil. You can use a wide range of species for this - lupins, peas, vetch, oats, etc. We are going to plant mustard in our poly house beds over the winter as one strategy to try to deal with the soil borne diseases that took such a toll on our tomatoes and eggplant this summer.
Crops that are great to plant now are things like beetroot, broccoli, cabbage, cauli, carrots, lettuce, pak choi, rocket, silverbeet, chard, leeks, spring onions, radish, peas, coriander, dill, parsley, etc, etc. Plant garlic now and in the next few months to grow over winter for a spring/early summer harvest.
And if you want more beans and corn this season, get them in quick or they won’t have time before they really slow down in the cooler times ahead.
I’m pretty tuckered after this season, and look forward to the shorter, cooler days and slower pace of autumn - easily my favorite season.
Rod