Your spring food garden

For your organic garden, spring is a time when nature really awakens from its winter slumber and life in your food garden is transformed.

Here are my tips to help you have a productive food garden over the next 3 months.

• Vegie bed preparation – If you are finishing winter crops for your local climate, prepare your growing space, fertilise with the organic methods you normally work with, mulch lightly, put up climbing frames if you are growing climbing plants.

• Vegie planting – Choose the right crops for this time of the year for your local climate using a planting calendar. Plant at the ideal time of the day, make use of the planets for the optimum days and use your compost as the planting medium when planting into the beds.

• Vegie garden care – Be aware of sudden changes in temperate. The cross-over of seasons can produce frost in temperate climates and get very hot in sub-tropical; both of these conditions can ruin the tender seedlings you are growing. Take action to protect your plants until spring is fully underway.

• Fruit tree blooming – Spring is often a time of flowering for fruit trees. Avoid doing your pruning now; it should have been done in the dormancy period. As your fruit begin to set, increase watering to help with fattening of fruit. Use you organic brews to fertilise the soil around the fruit trees and don’t overdo it.

You should notice a lot more flowers coming out in and round your gardens now. The bees have become much more active, especially in our hives. It is beautiful to observe this transformation of life and to eat the incredible honey.

I am planting fruiting crops such as cucumbers, beans, roma tomatoes, pumpkins, capsicums, zucchinis and eggplant. These will be a little slow to start because it is still cool at the night. I will also combine leafy crops that don’t mind the warmth, grow quickly and can be placed in the shade of climbing frames I create for some of the fruiting crops we grow.

Happy spring food gardening.

PS: check out our workshops for the next 3 months and if you need some personalised guidance, our home visit organic garden mentoring service, face-to-face in Brisbane and over skpe elsewhere in Australia will get you on track.