APRIL planting guide – how to grow HUGE Autumn Veggies! Melbourne – Gardening Australia

I show you everything you need to be doing in April to prepare your vegetable garden to get the biggest and best Autumn vegetable harvests.

I’ll provide you with a full Autumn planting guide, tell you what to plant in April in Melbourne, Australia, or anywhere else with a similar cool climate.

Today we’re planting Cabbage, snow peas, sugar snap peas, lettuce, beetroot, broccolini, broccoli, bok choi and lots more.

I’ll also show you how to make your own netting for the garden.

You can check out the full range of FoodCube products using this link: foodcube.com.au/CHRISTIECOOPER . While this is not a sponsored video, any Foodcube purchases made using this link help support this channel as I can earn a small commission. Alternatively you can use the code CHRISTIECOOPER at the checkout.

Music: Bensound
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#VegetableGarden #AutumnGarden #PlantingGuide #April #AutumnVegetables

five things you should be doing right now to ensure an awesome and huge Harvest of autumn and winter [Music] veggies it’s April here in Melbourne Australia and Autumn is here I’m finally getting some energy back after having my baby which means it is time to reset the garden and plant plant plant I’m going to be taking you through everything that you need to be doing right now in your Gardens to ensure a huge autum and winter Harvest I’m also going to take you through what we’ve already got growing a quick little tour of the garden as I do every month and I’m going to take you through all the things that you can be planting right now the most important thing you’ve got to do when you are starting to plan your autumn and winter veggies is to refresh your soil so these beds until a few days ago with chocolate block full of our leftover summer produce we’ve pulled out almost all of the tomatoes we’ve pulled out uh all of the chilies I have left a couple of capsicum plants here because they’d sort of been hiding underneath the other chili plants and I could see they still had a lot of fruit wanting to get going so I wasn’t prepared to pull them out just yet but everything else is out and in the meantime I’ve been refreshing the soil around it what do I mean by refreshing the soil well every time you grow something in your soil the food that you grow uses up all the nutrients n so you got to put the nutrients back in there are some really easy ways to do that what I’ve done I’ve added in each of my big beds a bag of compost a bag of cow manure that’s got to be aged cow manure plus I have sprinkled in Blood and Bone and worm castings all these things add nutrients and other elements back into the soil so that the next lot of veggies can Thrive if that all sounds way too complicated and you just want one stick to compost if you just add fresh compost to your soil that will be doing loads of good speaking of compost I don’t want to turn you off making your own but have a look what I found in mine a few days ago okay I just squealed like a baby because I was just turning my compost look what I found yeah good luck getting out of there mate yeah po God did you see that the next thing you’re going to want to think about is some netting because a lot of the winter veggies have leaves that taste good not only to us but also to all sorts of insects so brassas in particular they’ll get smashed by all sorts of insects unless you protect them here is a really simple way of setting up some netting to protect your garden beds so here I’ve got some 13 mm piping which I just bought from Bunnings but you can get from any hardware store I measured it out by size chopped it off and just squished it [Music] in so once you’ve got these little bits at the end here you can cut them into smaller pieces cut them down the side and then use them as clips [Music] now I’m just going to leave that half done for now because I’ve got some cabbages in there I need to protect and I can stretch that out and continue over the rest of it once these guys are finished the next thing you’ve got to get right when planting out your Autumn vegetable garden is planting the right things so if we’re planting now the weather is going to progressively get cooler over the next few months and many things we plant now will still be in the garden over winter so that knocks out anything that can’t tolerate cold conditions the basil which is growing beautifully at the moment I wouldn’t bother planting now because it won’t do well over winter other things will Thrive so a lot of your brassicas uh will do really well you might notice this one here my 3-year-old daughter’s pot I said let’s go plant something together so we can watch it grow she was determined to plant something in here so we’ve got little little Easter egg radishes in here uh which should grow very quickly and they are quite small so it’s going to be a bit crowded in there so these are some seeds that I’ve started just in the last few days which I will let uh grow and get a bit stronger in here before I transplant them sugar snap peas I’m going to stick some of these straight in the garden too uh purple kale purple broccoli or any kind of broccoli and broccoletti these are little lettuce seedlings more lettuce seeds have gone in there and here got green feced peas and snow peas so peas Galore I love peas from the garden they’re you all right sausage hello are you okay you’re going to love peas one day too now if we take a look in these beds I have freshened these beds up as well so I have added in here a bit of compost a bit of manure some Blood and Bone and some worm castings and I have lettuces at different stages so you can see some I’ve had in there for a little bit longer that are getting closer to being able to eat and enjoy and I’ve got some that I have just stuck in so these I just stuck in the last couple of days got my rocket at the back there which I’ve trimmed right back and that will keep on growing for a little while and I’ve got some spinach over here which I’ve also just put in I’m also going to put some spinach seeds in today the great thing about the food cubes is your plants don’t have to compete for water because they’re watering from the bottom or wicking beds so while in ordinary beds you need to leave quite a bit of space between some your veggies you don’t have to do that as much with the food cubes so I’m going to stick uh snow peas and sugar snap peas in here first they need trellises I’m going to reuse one from last season two from last [Music] season and then you literally just stick the seeds in water them let them grow snow peas in [Applause] [Music] here same for my sugar snap [Music] pce [Music] my tomato plant which I will pull out fairly soon but I am just leaving this one growing a little bit longer because it’s healthier than the others this tomato plant in my food Cube has done better than my other tomato plants probably because it’s got such constant access to water and probably because the soil that we put in there was so good I’ve talked about the food cubes quite a bit if you guys are interested in checking them out or getting some for yourself I’ll put a drop- down Link in here where you can check out the website I’m going to stick some of these green face peas up the back in this bed [Music] [Applause] here [Music] and you might notice I’ve got some purple cabbage seedlings here too while we’re on the topic of cabbages yes it is a great time to be planting cabbages either from seed or from seedlings excuse me I’m doing everything one-handed because not only am I filming I’ve also got a little munchkin on my lap so what I’m going to do today because these are quite slow growing these cabbages they’ll take a while I’m going to stick some fast growing things in between there got a bunch of radish seeds here this is the lazy girls planting all the busy M planting the other things I’m going to plant in here are some broccoli this will take a while so time tiny little broccoli seeds yeah I’m just going to sprinkle them too because sprinkling them in there and I can th them out later broccoli we’ve got cabbage we’ve got radish seeds and seedlings that I can cover [Music] [Music] up I’ll be there for now good luck so over in this bed uh I’m now going to stick some beet fruit seeds in so again I’m just going to sprinkle and hope for the best now on to the next point for what you need to do to ensure a huge Harvest of autumn and winter veggies these three plants are the prime example all of them I had given up on all of them looked virtually dead and were definitely not producing any new fruit until I did one thing so the reason they weren’t doing very well is because I was heavily pregnant I was exhausted I was watering the garden and that was all I was doing I wasn’t spending any time fixing up my soil or adding fertilizer this all changed Within just a few days of me trying a new liquid fertilizer on my garden and this is what I’ve used I bought these from QP seedlings because I wanted to get some new seedlings in order to get the online delivery I needed to spend a maximum $40 so I thought I try out their liquid fertilizer because I needed some two part Pro a and pro B I always knew liquid fertilizer helped um but I was stunned by just how much of a difference it made particularly after I’d been neglecting my soil so uh 50 Ms of that and 50 Ms of that into water and just sprinkled on your garden and literally within a week I had these plants tomatoes and capsicums that I was about to pull out because they weren’t fruiting anymore and I thought they’d reach the end of their life they just all started producing fruits again I’ll give you a little peek at just some of the other bits we’ve got growing at the moment lots of parsley under there some rocket at the back lettuce here and bok choy I have pulled out most of my chilies because we just have so many actual chilies we can’t get through them all but I haven’t pulled this one out yet why uh who knows but there’s lots of beautiful chilies on there our lemon and lime trees have been getting attacked by the gall wasp learned something quite interesting when you get these bulges here it’s often a sign that the gore wasps have been laying eggs in the plant okay I’ve found an example in here this might be tricky to film but you can see how that’s got the Bulge around there let me zoom in I have got a peeler I’ve got a peeler here on a peel the sides show you what’s on the inside go look at that you can see those eggs in there I found another one here I’ve got my peeler shave it or peel it or whatever expose the eggs they will die they can’t survive like that and then they will end up looking here’s another one I did earlier you’ll end up looking like that all the eggs die off and you save your tree continuing around the garden beautiful parsley spring onion growing in there oh baby rocket over there my basil baby and my trusty carrots they just keep on giving something that I don’t talk about as much anymore because it’s sort of become a bit of a given is light but it is absolutely critical if you don’t get your light right your Auto and winter veggies will not grow many areas of your garden that get a lot of sunlight in the summer will get quite different levels of sunlight in the winter the sun’s obviously changing position in the sky there are some pockets in my garden that get a beautiful amount of sunshine in the summer and not enough to grow anything in the winter so make sure you are watching your garden intently as the months go by and making sure that what you have in the garden has enough sunlight enough is usually 6 hours of direct sunlight every day some veggies can do with less than that and some quite like a dappled light things like lettuce can do quite well in partial shade but make sure your veggies are getting enough sunshine and if they’re not think really hard about relocating your veggie garden if you like this video I would really appreciate it if you could hit the like button that helps give the video a bit of a boost and help other people find it happy [Music] gardening