We here at Backyard Gardening Australia have two main times of planting of vegetable crops a year, one in summer and another in winter. Here in Perth, we are about to come into spring and our garden beds are soon going to be looking very empty as we begin to pick the end of our winter planting. We like to have our next season’s vegetable planting ready to go in as the garden beds empty. So, we have just recently sown a heap of seeds, some in seedling trays other directly sown.
Here are the vegetables we have planted for this summer.
- Beetroot – Forono. We have never grown this variety before, and we thought we would give it a go
- Beans – Dwarf golden wax and borlotti. We are growing the dwarf golden wax for fresh beans and the borlotti beans to use as dried beans.
- Broccoli – Purple Sprouting. This is a little experimental as we found growing broccoli in summer has big problem with pest and bolts easily. We are going to be trying to grow it under 50 per cent shade cloth and have it fully covered in to stop pests.
- Black spanish radish. We enjoyed our last crop of them over winter and thought we would see how well they do grow over summer
- Carrot – all-rounder. This variety has been doing great in our garden so we will continue to use it.
- Chinese cabbage – Wombok. Wanting to experiment more with salad this summer
- Cucumber – Spacemaster. This year we are going to just grow one variety of cucumber for everything. We have heard good things about spacemaster being versatile, so we are giving it a go.
- Cucamelon – we grew them a few years ago and they were a great producer. We would like to try and pickle them this year.
- Eggplant – Fairy tale. We have grown this variety for a few years and love it.
- Sweet Corn – Snow gold bicolour and Kelvedon glory. We are trying new varieties this year to see how they go overall on taste, growth, disease and pest resistant.
- Honeydew melon – White Antibes. Another new variety for us, honeydews melon variety we grew last year called rockmelon honeydew, grew great but was unable to get the seed for it this year.
- Potatoes – Nicola. Growing this variety again as it has proved itself to be a reliable producer for us.
- Pumpkins – J.A.P, butternut and trombinca. We have always struggled to grow JAP pumpkins here but this year we are going all out and only growing this variety of large round pumpkin. Butternuts we grow every year and they always do well. We are also trying to grow trombinca pumpkins as well for the first time as they were recommend to us by my uncle.
- Rockmelon – Hales Best. Have grown this variety for a few years and it always does well
- Tomatoes – We are growing a few varieties of tomatoes again this year. We have our tested and tried tomato varieties which we plant every year plus we like to try a couple of new varieties. The tested and tried varieties we are growing are mortgage lifter, san marzano, money maker and tommy toe. The new varieties we are trying this year are tomato blue berries which is a cherry tomato and blue beauty which is a beefsteak size tomato.
- Zucchini – Grey and Black Beauty. We have been growing black beauty for a while with great success, but we thought we would give a new variety a go as well this year which is why we are trying the grey variety for a different flavour.
These are the vegetables we are planting however other things that we have growing in the garden over summer are asparagus, self-seeded lettuce, self-seeded rocket, green onions, over wintered chilli and jerusalem artichokes.
Remember that summer in Perth can be very hot and some plants will need some help after the long hot summer days. Here is how we help our plants get through the summer heat.
