Vegetable and fruit garden in full swing again

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Autumn, that most favoured of all the seasons, is here, and in my neck of the woods, that means it's growing season. I live in the subtropics, and while Winter temperatures do sometimes drop to zero degrees C at night, the days are usually warm with clear blue skies. March marks the beginning of our new gardening season. We pull out all of summers old crops, build up the soils again with home made compost, manures, worm castings and blood and bone, and start again from scratch. It's a great time of year.

The garden is slowly taking shape. Hanno has planted his crops in small stands of neat rows. Not everything is in yet but it's getting there. On the other side of the garden there is a full garden of potatoes and one empty bed that will be planted up entirely with kale. So let me take you on a visit through my garden to show you what else we're growing this year.

We have four types of tomatoes - the one above is an oxheart, and soon it will be pulled out, but we've also planted Brandywines, Amish paste and Moneymaker. Three different tomatoes for three different uses. The Brandywines for sandwiches, the Amish paste for cooking and the Moneymakers for salads. We also have cherry tomatoes coming up all over the place. Tommy Toe cherry grows wild here and we generally pull then out when we see them, otherwise they take over.

In the photo above we have the newly planted tomatoes at the far end, with sugar loaf cabbages at the front. You can also see a flowering parsley plant that is almost ready to have its seeds collected, and a marigold. While I don't particularly like marigolds, we plant them as a safeguard against nematodes. Flowers play an important role in an organic garden because they attract beneficial insects and some are useful companions. When all the vegetables are in, I'll plant some low growing daisies, in little pockets here and there, and maybe some cosmos or evening primrose.

Here we have a patch in which parsnips seeds have been sown, then corn, bok choi and a lot of lettuce.

We are concentrating on red and brown onions and leeks this year. We've had trouble with onions in the past, but we'll plant them again, with leeks, and maybe some garlic, and hope they grow as well as these green onions, which are perennial Welsh onions. This lot have been going for about five years.

We also grow fruit. Here we have one orange tree (Washington Navel) putting on new growth on one side of the garden, and below, a dwarf navel with ripening oranges. The orange above was pruned earlier in the year, so we know we won't get fruit on it this season but we thought the sacrifice worth it as the tree now looks so healthy. There is time enough for fruit next year.

These bananas were picked just after I took this photo and quite a few of them are now in the kitchen.

Just next to the bananas, we have a lattice full of loofas, although one vine has managed to leap over to the back fence and grow its fruit on top of the fence where the sun will hit it most of the day. Clever plant.

And here below are the lattice loofas almost ready for harvest.

Further over again, passionfruit are growing. We have several vines, these are on the large water tank, just behind the shed. When I see them growing in their green and luscious glory I always think it would be a good idea to make passionfruit butter or cordial, but the truth is we usually eat all of them fresh, straight off the vine, cut in half and scooped out with a spoon.

And just because they followed me all over the backyard while I took my photos, here are Alice and Heather. Heather is a little salmon coloured Faverolles chicken, complete with feathered trousers and a fluffy, puffy face. She's a bossy boots, even though she's probably the smallest of our chooks, she keeps the others on their toes.

No doubt I'll do updates on the garden as it grows, but now it's at my favourite stage - full of promise, healthy and not one grasshopper in sight. I read somewhere recently there has been a huge increase in the sale of vegetable seeds this year. That tells me that a lot more people are taking responsibility for their own food and will try their hand at vegetable gardening. Which brings us all back closer to where we should be - eating fresh vegetables and fruit and looking after ourselves. So if you're a new gardener, I hope you enjoy your garden, learn more than you ever thought you would and reap a bountiful harvest. Happy gardening, everyone.