The Garden Clinic

Kitchen Garden: Autumn

18 March, 2021 | Linda Ross

We’re picking basket-loads of dark green kale, snacking on mandarins, pickling the beetroot harvest and turning the last tomatoes into bottles of sauce. From patch to plate autumn is full of colour and flavour.

Kitchen garden: Rhubarb

18 March, 2021 | Linda Ross

Rhubarb is one of the few perennial vegetables. A clump will produce tangy, juicy stems season after season with almost no effort from the gardener.

Kitchen Garden: Spring

18 March, 2021 |

We love picking dinner fresh from the vegie patch. Everything tastes so much better! Spring is a busy time in the edible garden. Here are our tips and tricks for a bumper summer harvest.

Kitchen garden: Spring jobs

18 March, 2021 | Linda Ross

There’s inspiration here to help expand your vegetable repertoire – in the garden and on the plate!

Kitchen Garden: Spring Planting

18 March, 2021 | Linda Ross

It’s time to pull out winter crops to make room for summer’s great produce. Here Linda Ross shares her know-how and experience about what to plant now to keep a family of four enjoying delicious home-grown food all through summer.

Kitchen Garden: Subtropical summer

18 March, 2021 | Arno King

Gardening for the kitchen in the subtropics? Our resident tropical garden expert Arno King has the lowdown on all the seasonal jobs, as well as the tips and tricks to get things happening in the subtropical kitchen garden.

Kitchen Garden: subtropical winter

18 March, 2021 | Arno King

Arno is a garden designer and writer whose garden in Brisbane is mostly edible. He is constantly testing the received garden wisdom for its relevance to subtropical gardeners, and trialling new products. Lets see what Arno's growing this winter

Kitchen Garden: Summer

18 March, 2021 |

Summer is all about harvest: buckets of tomatoes, cucumbers and beans are flooding into the kitchen. The only challenge is finding enough tomato recipes!

Kitchen Garden: Summer Herbs

18 March, 2021 | Linda Ross

Plenty of summer herbs need the heat of the sun to intensify their flavour. Here Linda Ross lists her pick of the bunch.

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Kitchen Gardens: Peas

18 March, 2021 | Linda Ross

Nothing tastes like spring quite as much a sweet pea - whether freshly podded, or enjoyed pod and all. The only trick is to get the peas to the kitchen before the children eat them all off the vines!

Kitchen Gardens: Temperate

18 March, 2021 | Linda Ross

Springtime in the temperate kitchen garden is time for soil preparation, tomato planting, and building structures for vine crops.

Know your winter bulbs

18 March, 2021 | Linda Ross

When autumn leaves have fallen, elegant little floral petticoats burst from the soil in optimistic, spring-anticipating growth.

Know your: balcony flowers

18 March, 2021 | Linda Ross

Add some summer dazzle to a sunny balcony with these pot-loving beauties.

Know your: indoor plants

18 March, 2021 | Linda Ross

Plants make indoor spaces beautiful and people happy. Here are a few easy-care options to start - or enlarge! - your indoor garden.

Lemon Delicious

18 March, 2021 | Robin Powell

Self-saucing puddings are a dessert staple at my place through winter, and the tangy, silky lushness of an old-fashioned lemon delicious is a favourite. I like it with icing sugar sprinkled on top and whipped cream on the side, but my kids always vote for the hot/cold thrill of vanilla ice cream as an accompaniment. If you like, instead of serving from a pudding dish, you can cook the puddings in six individual one-cup ovenproof dishes.

Lemons

18 March, 2021 | Linda Ross

Lemons are the most versatile of fruits – both the juice and zest enliven drinks, marinades, dressings, puddings, cakes, biscuits and sorbets – yet gardeners find that lemons give them a pain. Here Linda explains how to make lemons your favourite squeeze!

Macadamia

18 March, 2021 | Linda Ross

There’s more to a macadamia than a chocolate-coated, or salted, roasted nut. This plant might provide our best known and loved native food, but it’s also a beautiful shade tree for a medium-sized garden. Linda Ross shares the good oil on growing the king of the nuts in your own garden.

Macadamia integrifolia

18 March, 2021 | Ally Jackson

The macadamia hails from Queensland and northern NSW but for a long time it was better known in Hawaii than in its homeland.

Mango

18 March, 2021 | Sandra Ross

Nothing on earth smells as good as the first whiff of a new season mango! And the pleasure is even greater when the fruit is from your own garden. Sandra Ross shares her growing hints for this tropical favourite.

Meet Dr Kate Neale, garden-health researcher

18 March, 2021 | Robin Powell

What are the therapeutic benefits of gardening in social housing, preschools, schools, health services and aged care? Dr Kate Neale from Southern Cross University is keen to find out, starting with KindyGarden, a program aimed at getting 3-5 year olds growing food.

Meet Keith and Maureene Smith

18 March, 2021 | Robin Powell

Cancer fundraisers and plant propagators

Meet Tahnee Carroll, Stylist and plant-lover

18 March, 2021 | Lauren Camilleri and Sophia Kaplan

Tahnee Carroll has never seen a room that can’t be made more appealing with a plant or two, as she explains in this extract from a new book on indoor plants, ‘Leaf Supply’.

Meet: Justin Russell, market gardener

18 March, 2021 | Robin Powell

Justin Russell was a keen gardener and a writer about gardening until last November, when he and wife Kylie plunged into full-time market gardening. It's been a tough road, with severe drought.

Meet: Matt Purbrick, village life enthusiast

18 March, 2021 | Interview: Linda Ross Pictures: Shantanu Starick

The happiest healthiest people in the world are those who live in simple agricultural communities where life is shared. It’s a way of life that Matt Purbrick and his partner Lentil enjoy in regional Victoria and extoll through their business, Grown and Gathered.

Melons

18 March, 2021 | Jake Byrne

A sweet slice of cold melon on a hot summer’s day – irresistible! Watermelons, rockmelons and honeydew melons are easy to grow in the backyard as long as you have a bit of space.

Mickey's garden

18 March, 2021 | Mickey Robertson

Mickey Robertson gardens at Glenmore House near Camden. Sounds like a scene out of Pride and Prejudice? Well yes, you do feel as though you've traveled back in time where women wear linen and the air smells clean. Winter, she says, is crisp mornings thawing to glorious blue-sky days. Early morning reveal traces of frost on cabbage and kale leaves; and sometimes, just sometimes, the paddocks blanketed in white. Evenings also have a rhythm all their own as woodsmoke trails through the valley. Here she shares glimpses of days in her winter garden.

Moon Planting

18 March, 2021 | Robin Powell

Could a better understanding of the night sky be your key to a more productive vegetable garden?

Mulberry

18 March, 2021 | Linda Ross

No summer goes by in the Ross family household without mulberry jam, mulberry pie, and swirled mulberry icecream. Fancy the menu? Take Linda’s tips on growing the hero ingredient.

Olives

18 March, 2021 | Linda Ross

Olives have been cultivated commercially for more than 5000 years, since well before Socrates pondered the meaning of life as he wandered through the groves of Athens. Individual trees are themselves capable of living more than 2000 years, entitling them to oversee not only generations but entire civilisations. Planting one in your garden offers not only delicious pickled fruit, but a link to the past, and way into the future.

Oranges

18 March, 2021 | Linda Ross & Justin Russell

Orange trees are jewels for the home garden with shiny green foliage, sweet-smelling blossom and glowing winter fruit.

Oranges 2

18 March, 2021 | Linda Ross

Sweet golden oranges are winter’s special treat. They hang on our trees like glowing globes and feature in our kitchens as breakfast juice and marmalade; cakes and desserts; salads and delicious any-time snacks. Linda Ross has the juice on how to get the best from them in your garden.

Papaya

18 March, 2021 | Justin Russell

I grew up around papaws. My grandpa grew them. My uncles grew them. My parents grew them. They live in memory, but the old papaw has of late taken a back seat to the more luscious, tropical papaya.

Papaya and coconut muffins

18 March, 2021 | Robin Powell

Here’s a healthy morning tea treat or after-school snack. Muffins with the sweet goodness of fresh papaya. It’s too easy!

Passionfruit

18 March, 2021 | Linda Ross

Get it right and you’ll be plucking bucket-loads of fruit from your passionfruit vine; get it wrong and you won’t see a single sausage! We have the answers.

Peas

18 March, 2021 | Justin Russell

Here’s a garden fact: you can never plant too many peas. Every year Justin Russell rues not having doubled his initial sowing. But not this year. Join in, plan big and follow his tips for a bumper harvest.

Perch Hill Farm

18 March, 2021 | Linda Ross

Linda is passionate about growing all her own vegetables at home. So she sought inspiration from England’s great gardener, writer, teacher, and vegetable grower, Sarah Raven.

Pineapples

18 March, 2021 | Linda Ross

Linda Ross was suffering from pineapple nostalgia: for when car trips up north invariably passed through fields of pineapples and by the tremendous (for a 9-year-old) ‘Big Pineapple’. So she grew pineapples in her backyard patch in Sydney and surprised herself and the family with a bumper harvest!

Plant Thai food

18 March, 2021 | Linda Ross

We love to plan our vegetable beds around dinner, so we grow a pizza-patch, a ratatouille garden, and our current favourite, a Thai takeaway. This is a hot-spot of the herbs, spices, vegetables and fruits that go into favourites such as tom yum soup and Thai beef salad. Here we offer tips for a scaled-down version that is, in the tradition of Thai takeaway puns, Thairiffic!

Planting potatoes

18 March, 2021 | Linda Ross

Order potatoes now and plant in spring for a delicious feed of new potatoes for in summer, and a second harvest next winter.

Plums

18 March, 2021 | Linda Ross

As if the beautiful spring blossom of the plum were not enough to make it a lovely small tree choice for the home garden, it also deliver splump juicy fruit for eating, stewing, bottling, drying and cooking. The only question is which plum to plump for. Here we consider the options.

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