Planting the Summer Veggie Garden

Labour Weekend (a holiday in NZ on the last Monday in October) is the perfect time for planting your summer veggie garden. Some plants can be sown or seedlings planted earlier on but summer stalwarts like tomatoes, capsicums, and cucumbers don’t like cold soil and cold night temperatures. Previously when I’ve been tempted to plant them earlier, they haven’t grown well and in fact ended up behind those that I planted just a few weeks later when the soil was warmer.

This year the weather was pretty warm a couple of weeks before Labour Weekend so I did go and buy all my plants and seeds earlier than usual, but I kept some of them in my mini-glasshouse for two more weeks before planting out in the garden.

A problem with growing vegetables all year round is that sometimes you have to wait for one crop to finish before you can pull out the plants to put in the next. This year I had to wait to harvest the last of my broad beans that had been growing like triffids before I could plant up one of my garden spaces. I decided to grow more herbs there this year, and have included artichoke and fennel for something different.

In an earlier post I talking about growing more veggies in a small space by growing plants upwards wherever you can and planting things close together. I followed those principles again as you can see in the photos below.