Clever Planting Guide

You may have already met Nathalie via the comments. I was poking around on her blog yesterday, and discovered her fantastic planting guide. It is such a useful resource, because Nathalie does succession planting, something I am very bad at remembering to do, so that she doesn't have a glut of one vegie at once, or worse, a hungry gap where you kick yourself for not planting those lettuces. She even shows the number of seeds she plants, sufficient for a family of four. Brilliant!

Nathalie plants for a cold zone, which here in Oz means cold winters, frosts but no snow. Even in Tasmania we can grow lettuce throughout the winter. Well, we can if we plant it early enough. There is no point planting anything after the end of April here, it just sulks all winter, then bolts to seed in spring.

I am hoping that using Nathalie's planting chart I may remember to plant all the veg in good time for the cold weather next year. Meantime, I will be spending this afternoon ripping out the tomato and bean bushes to make way for garlic and broad beans. It is so sad. My pampered potted tomatoes have put on new growth, and are even flowering. There are baby beans. Little do they know that the frost is coming, and they are doomed. I picked all of the green tomatoes yesterday, and put them on newspaper on the laundry bench. My mother-in-law used to do this, and they mostly ripened, so we will see what happens.

This morning I will be buying new secateurs. I have looked everywhere for my old ones. I think that I may have laid them down on top of a tub of noxious weeds, then tipped them into the bin. It has happened before. Sigh.