Vegetables

Late spring frost and an early autumn leave cool and alpine gardens a short summer. Here is how to count your frost-free weeks, choose quick crops and get them ripe in time.

When spinach and lettuce bolt in spring, a different set of leafy greens takes over. How to sow, pick and safely cook seven heat-loving greens, plus sweet potato leaves, zone by zone.

Vegetables run to seed early for three reasons: warmth and longer days, a cold spell followed by warmer weather, and stress. How to delay bolting in each climate zone, and what to do once a plant has bolted.

Nearly everyone is told to buy a rhubarb crown. Seed is cheaper and gives you a batch of plants, but the seedlings vary and the first real harvest is further away. Here is the honest trade-off, and how to do it well.

Silverbeet keeps making leaves long after spinach has run to seed. Here is how to sow it, thin the clumps, feed it for leaf and pick it for months, zone by zone.

Brussels sprouts are one of the easiest winter crops to get wrong, and the reason is nearly always the sowing date. Here is when to sow in each Australian climate zone, and where the crop is not worth the bed space.

Parsnips have the worst germination reputation of any common vegetable, and the causes are few. Here is how to get a first crop up, and why cold makes the roots sweet.

Leeks are a long crop, not a hard one. Here is the autumn sowing, the dibber hole that makes the white shank, and what actually causes a leek to bolt.

Garlic lifted too early never fills out and lifted too late falls apart in store. The leaf count that tells you when to dig, and the curing that decides how long it keeps.

Melons are not hard, they are just fussy about heat and water at the end. How to sow rockmelon and honeydew, how many fruit to leave on a vine and how to pick at peak sweetness.

A cucumber grown up a trellis is cleaner, straighter and easier to pick than one sprawled on the ground. How to sow, train, water and harvest cucumbers in an Australian summer.

Beans are the fastest return in the summer garden, as long as the soil is warm and you keep picking. The differences between bush, climbing and runner types, and how to grow each one.