This week I finally wandered back through the garden after spending three weeks away with the family.
Winter gardens have a funny way of humbling you. You never quite know what you’ll find.
Some plants surprise you.
Some disappoint you.
Some simply refuse to give up.
If you’ve been wondering what a real Southern Highlands garden looks like in late July, here’s an honest update from mine.
🌾 The grain won this round
Last winter I mulched my potato beds with hay.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t straw.
Now I have a bed full of grain.
At this stage, the roots are well established, so it’s no longer a quick five-minute weeding job. I’ll gradually pull the larger clumps while the soil is damp and mulch over the cleared areas.
Lesson learnt: next year I’ll use straw or homemade mulch instead.
🥦 Not everything survived… but enough did
The rabbits and snails definitely enjoyed winter.
I planted several broccoli and cauliflower seedlings before we left.
Today I found:
- 1 cauliflower survived.
- 4 broccoli survived.
- A few snail bites.
- No rabbits (today at least!).
Would I have liked better?
Of course.
Am I still excited?
Absolutely.
Sometimes gardening is celebrating the plants that decided to keep going.
🥬 The surprise winner… celery!
While most of the garden is quietly waiting for spring, the celery couldn’t care less.
It’s thriving.
Glossy leaves.
Strong growth.
Ready to harvest.
It might actually be becoming one of my favourite winter vegetables.
💜 I still can’t pull out the kale
I know…
It’s reaching the end of its life.
It’s tall.
It’s messy.
But it’s still feeding us.
So it’s staying.
Besides, the bees will enjoy the flowers when spring arrives.
🫐 Blueberries are looking sorry for themselves
My blueberries have definitely had a hard winter.
I’m not giving up on them yet though.
The stems are still alive, so I’ll wait until late winter before checking the roots and giving them a fresh acidic potting mix if needed.
Gardening has taught me not to write plants off too early.
🌱 The greenhouse continues to surprise me
The greenhouse reached 23°C today, despite another cold Southern Highlands morning.
It’s become less of a greenhouse and more of a propagation house.
The shelves are full.
The workbench is busy.
There are seed packets, pots, labels and half-finished jobs everywhere.
It isn’t Instagram perfect.
It’s simply where things grow.
The biggest lesson this week
One thing gardening in the Southern Highlands has taught me is that we’re still very much in our winter growing season.
While much of Australia is thinking about tomatoes and summer vegetables, we’re still expecting cold mornings for another six weeks or more.
That means there’s still plenty of time to sow and grow cold-loving crops like broccoli, kale, spinach, peas, broad beans, lettuce and leeks.
Our gardens simply run on a different timetable.
Final thoughts
Every winter I seem to learn something new.
This year it was:
- Don’t mulch potatoes with hay full of seed.
- Mesh the beds before the rabbits move in.
- Celery loves my garden.
- Kale is tougher than I am.
- One surviving cauliflower is worth celebrating.
- The greenhouse is becoming the hardest-working little building on the property.
Gardens don’t have to be perfect.
They just have to keep teaching us.