Vegetables

Sweet corn is wind pollinated, so a short fat block beats a long thin row every time. Here is how to sow it, feed it, water it at the right moment and pick every cob at its sweetest.

Chillies are perennials that frost turns into annuals. Keep the plant alive through winter and it fruits weeks earlier next summer. Which climates can do it, and how.

Some crops feed you for half a year after harvest with nothing more than a cool, dark cupboard. The best storage vegetables, how to cure them and how to keep them.

Lettuce can be picked every week of the year in most of Australia if you match the type to the season, sow little and often, and outwit the heat. Here is the year-round plan.

Crowded plants share light, water and disease. What the spacing on the packet is really for, the difference between sowing and final spacing, and a metric guide for the crops most people grow.

Carrots that never came up, forked into legs, went hairy or turned green at the top all have simple causes. Here is how to read the root and grow straight, sweet carrots.

The leaves look fine but the fruit is split, sunken, scarred or missing. A guide to the problems that show up on the tomato itself, what causes each one and what to change.

Cauliflower is the fussiest brassica, and the head tells you exactly what went wrong. What tiny buttons, fuzzy curds, brown patches and purple tinges mean, and how to grow a clean white head.

Lush leaves and a stringy nothing underneath. The reasons root vegetables refuse to swell, from crowding and rich soil to heat and late harvest, and how to get proper roots next time.

Onions bulb on a signal from the length of the day, not the calendar. Why the wrong variety or sowing date gives you spring onions instead of bulbs, and how to get it right for your part of Australia.

Big leafy cabbages with nothing in the middle are one of the most common winter-garden complaints. Ten causes, from the wrong season to a cold snap, and the fix for each.

Learn how to grow tomatoes from seed with this back-to-basics tutorial. The best gardening tips to growing tomatoes in your own garden.