Growing Fruits And Vegetables In Autumn

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Autumn is the perfect season to spend a lot of your time on your garden. This is because it isn’t too hot or too cold yet that you would feel uncomfortable out under the sun, spending several hours outdoors doing the usual gardening chores.

Autumn is also the perfect time for you start a fruit and vegetable garden on your outdoor space. If you don’t have one yet and you always keep putting off this project, then this season is the right time for you to try this out.

What Should You Plant?

Choosing the right varieties of fruits and vegetables to plant is crucial if you want to be sure you will have something to harvest during and before the end of autumn.

If your garden is located in the subtropical area (Southeast QLD and Northern NSW) or in the wet and dry tropical region (North Queensland, NT, and WA), the fruits and vegetables you should be planting include:

  • Capsicum
  • Carrots
  • Celery
  • Melons
  • Tomatoes
  • Sweet potatoes
  • Spinach
  • Spring onions
  • Turnips

For those living in temperate areas including Sydney, Victoria, and NSW’s coastal area, here are some of vegetables you should be planting:

  • Broad beans
  • Green beans
  • English spinach
  • Peas
  • Garlic bulbs

Garden Care

The usual garden care and maintenance steps are essential to ensure the healthy growth and yield of your vegetables and fruits. Watering them frequently with the right amount of hydration is essential. Spreading organic fertiliser and compost is crucial as well. Weeds have to be prevented from crowding your plants, too.

Aside from these, you need to make sure you protect your plants from pests. Without the right pest control strategies, you will lose all your fruits and veggies to insects, aphids, and fungal diseases.

Here are some safe, organic pest control and prevention tips you can implement in your garden:

  • Water the soil instead of the foliage to prevent leaf fungal diseases.
  • Control aphids with the use of pyrethrum.
  • If you notice some tomatoes have the spotted virus wilt (which is caused by nematodes), remove them immediately so that this disease won’t spread to the other yield.
  • Hang sticky yellow insect traps throughout the vegetable patch to attract and trap flying insects such as fruit flies and thrips.
  • Place old, unused pantyhose over the growing tomatoes to prevent fruit flies from ruining the fruits.

If you want to spend more time outdoors during autumn, do something worthwhile like starting a garden kitchen in your lawn. Although this can be a hard and time-consuming project, everything will be worthwhile once you start seeing and tasting the fruits (and vegetables) of your labour.

For more garden and landscaping tips, tune in for more Jim’s Mowing NZ blogs.