I was watching Gardening Australia the other night when they mentioned their online vegetable planting guide. I popped on over to have a look, and it’s pretty good, so I thought I would share. You can find the guide here at the Gardening Australia website.

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We don’t have an ideal situation for growing our own vegetables. Despite living in the sunshine state, for most of the year, our tiny courtyard doesn’t get any sun at all. We have grown vegetables in the past, but the only months our yard gets sun, is the off season for growing here in QLD. We do however have ideal conditions for growing a good crop of moss.

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After doing a little digging (pardon the pun) I was surprised at just how many resources there are for free garden supplies. It really is possible to garden completely for free! Even so, some of these ideas aren’t entirely free.

Needless to say that gardening for free automatically involves gardening organically. No purchase of chemical fertilisers and pesticides. Gardening for free involves a little more work and a little more time, but can be well worth it.

If you haven’t already, check out Part One – Seed Saving and Part Two – Propagating Cuttings.

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Gardening is not only an enjoyable hobby, it can supplement our diet, lowering our grocery bill. Like any hobby, gardening can be expensive, but it doesn’t have to be – in fact, it can be free. Last week we looked at seed saving as a way to garden for free, this week we will look at taking cuttings.

You can propagate an entire garden with cuttings from plants that you see around the neighbourhood, but be sure to ask permission before snipping away at the neighbours garden. The best types of plants for an ornamental garden are local natives as these will best suit your climate and growing conditions and encourage native wildlife; your local council  will be able to provide information regarding native plants.

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Seed saving is something we’ve been doing since the dawn of agriculture. It is not only a free way to grow plants, it is vital for biodiversity. Many heirloom plants are dying out or have already become extinct, saving seed ensures genetic diversity. For example, at the beginning of the 20th Century there were over 100 varieties of potato commonly eaten. Now we commonly eat only about four varieties. Biodiversity is important for ensuring our future food supply. Seed saved from your garden is adapted to your local climate, soil and pests without relying on chemical fertilizers and pesticides.

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Growing vegies at home has come back into fashion and where there’s a market, there’s a product.

One product I’ve seen a lot of recently is the raised garden bed. The great thing about one of these is that they’re portable, so you can just plop one down over cement or anywhere in the yard, courtyard, or even patio and take your garden with you when you move. And a raised garden bed can be easier on the back.

But why spend $60 or more buying a raised bed, when you can easily build one yourself for less than half the price. And of course, if you make it yourself, you can customise the size to exactly suit the space that you have and what you want to plant.

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If you’re wanting to start gardening, then you can’t go past parsley to start with. It’s easy to grow in a pot, can grow outside or in, and almost any dish in the kitchen can benefit from the addition of some fresh parsley.

Varieties

The two popular types of parsley include curly leaf parsley and Italian flat leaf parsley (see photo).

Growing

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Our garden is going well despite the fact we’ve only had a few showers of rain in the last four months. I should have taken a photo the other day – before we had started harvesting!

There’s a bit more sun now it’s coming close to summer, but the silver beet and the lettuce were chosen because of the fact we don’t usually get sun in our yard – except for the wet season when growing conditions are less than ideal.

The other night for dinner we had homemade tuna rissoles made with garlic chives and flat leaf parsley straight from the garden, served with home grown silver beet. I admit that we’re not going to be surviving off our garden anytime soon, it’s more of a token garden, but it’s amazing how much you can grow despite small spaces and less than ideal growing conditions.

There is something very special about eating the food that you produce yourself. It goes beyond the sense of pride and accomplishment. You can’t get any fresher than eating silver beet, lightly sautéed, that has been picked only minutes beforehand. Eating home grown produce straight from the soil is the ultimate in organic dining.

My father has grown vegetables ‘organically’ for as long as I can remember. I remember the kids over the fence wouldn’t eat their vegetables at home but would hang out waiting to munch on some fresh baby peas or beans, cherry tomatoes or strawberries, raw and straight from the garden.

I have childhood summer memories of my mother asking us to “go and tell your father to cut some silver beet,” or “ go and tell your father to pull up some spuds for dinner.” We would carry them in and be eating them very shortly after.

Maybe it’s just psychological, but everything just tastes better when you grow it yourself.

I can’t wait until we have a big backyard and can grow lots more, hopefully going a long way towards being semi-self-sufficient. But in the meantime, I’m making the most of the yard that we have, and enjoying eating the harvest.

There is a new show on SBS called Costa’s Garden Odyssey all about sustainable living / gardening. You can catch it on Thursdays at 8pm.

If you missed it, you can watch the 1st episode on the SBS website. Costa’s a bit of a character and enjoyable to watch. The website also includes a blog, factsheets and other videos.

Well it’s taken us nearly six months from building the veggie box to planting some seedlings, but we’ve finally done it! Green thumb here I come.

On the weekend we planted silver beet, lettuce and some parsley in the container on the side. There are also some garlic chives from last year at the front. We have some herbs growing from last year, and we’ll be getting a few more (for some reason I always kill the unkillable rosemary). We’re not going to be self sufficient anytime soon, but we have a few things to supplement our grocery shopping.

The box was built by my woodworking hubby with fence palings and a couple of stakes cut to size and cost about $20. The seedlings were $2.20 each for a punnet of six. The soil we dug up from the dirt mound that is our backyard and added some compost. Our soil is pretty sandy, but there was a lot of compost from the trees around, and there were plenty of worms and that can only be a good thing.

We planted silver beet and lettuce because of the lack of sunlight that we get in our yard.  They can tolerate shade, and prefer not to be in full sun anyway. The sun you see in the photo is about all we get in our yard at this time of the year. The sun has just crept over the fence, the time of the photo is 4pm. During winter (the dry season, where most of the veggie growing is done here) we get absolutely no sun in our yard at all. Our pavers are able to grow a good crop of moss, but despite living in one of the best climates in Australia, we’re not in a good position to grow much else…sigh! In the back section, I might put in a pumpkin vine or two next month, so that they are established before the wet season, when pumpkin plants tend to go mouldy.

Will we save money by growing some veggies? Maybe over time, once the garden is established, and certainly if compared to buying organic vegetables (we’ll be growing organically), but otherwise probably not. Still, it feels good to be growing some of our own produce.

When I was a kid we always had vegetables growing in the backyard. Tomatoes, beans, peas, silver beet, potatoes, pumpkin, zucchini, radishes, carrots, strawberries, rhubarb… There’s something special about going out to pick some beans for dinner, or eating fresh peas straight from the pod, or sun warm strawberries.

Back then “organic” wasn’t something that was mainstream. People didn’t generally buy organic and it didn’t receive mainstream media. But our backyard vegetables were organic. We used chook poo and grass clippings and no pesticides or yuckies, just natural goodness.

While we’re not going to have an awesome, self sufficient garden where we’re living now, I look forward to the time when we have a backyard right for growing. In the meantime, we’re here for a while, so I’m trying to make the most of the space that we have.