Canberra has always had an important role in space exploration.
Although the small NSW town of Parkes has stolen most of the limelight due to the popularity of the iconic film The Dish, it was actually Honeysuckle Creek tracking station in our National Capital which first broadcasted the historic first-steps moment to 600 million people across the globe in 1969!
And any type of gardening in Canberra can feel like an exercise in space exploration itself, given how challenging it can be in an extreme climate that oscillates between scorching heat and bitter cold from summer to winter. Keeping vegetables alive is an even harder task than it is for ornamental plants given their particular susceptibility to heat, frost and deficiency of water and nutrients.
Indeed sometimes it almost seems like we are trying to grow plants on the moon when temperatures fluctuate wildly and water and nutrients are almost non-existent. Soil moisture in Canberra is often much like that of moon-dust when we’re in times of drought after all. I’m sure older Canberrans still remember when harsh official water-restrictions were imposed during the millennium drought and this past summer has certainly been reminiscent of those parched days.
Thankfully, autumn rains have finally arrived this year, and we have experienced several wet La Nina events over recent years which has seen Canberra receive unusually high rainfall resulting in more plant death associated with drowning rather than thirst ironically! Particularly with Australian natives and Mediterranean species. So it’s been less of a moonscape of late and more of a quagmire around these parts.
But the good people at the BOM (and I’m not referring to their IT department by the way) are again predicting El Nino approaching the horizon again so we could be heading back to those desperate times where nosy neighbours monitor and report on your irrigation schedule and people start erecting signs announcing “Tank Water In Use!” out the front of their properties to ward off the local water police (i.e. the officious grumpy old-man next door sneaking out in his slippers and dressing gown in the dead of the night to sabotage your mains-water box).
Ok thanks for the climatic history lesson, now get on with the advice on veggie-gardening please, I hear you thinking – noting that you’re probably also thinking that you could have just quickly punched in terms “Veggie Gardening in Canberra” into Google or ChatGPT and it would have instantly spat out answers that seem to make sense. And they do. In fact I’ve just done it and the first thing old-mate ‘Chatmeister’ spewed out was this:
“1. Understand the climate (this is everything)
- Cold winters with frost (May-Sept)
- Hot, dry summers
- Short but productive spring & autumn (best growing times)
- Don’t plant frost-sensitive crops (like tomatoes) until after Melbourne Cup”
Top work ‘Chatty-Boy’, bang-on-great-job scouring the internet using that large language model of yours! I won’t disagree with your astute summation.
What I will disagree with however is the general assumption that this ‘Typical Canberra climate’ always holds true. Because anyone who has actually lived in Canberra for close to three decades (which I have) will be able to tell the fastidious little Chatbot that the word “Assume” will often make an “Ass” out of “U” and “Me”.
For example, although these past couple of winters have seen Canberra return to its standard-fare of frigid Antarctic winters, we actually had several very mild winters a few years ago where frosts were few and far between. If you can believe it, I was still growing tomatoes well into June one year!
On the flip side, although normal frequency recommenced this year with an absolute stinker, we have also had some unusually mild summers prior to that too.
And despite the general truth behind the state-the-bleeding-obvious assessment that spring and autumn are usually the best growing times, this is not always the case every year because sometimes nitrogen-rich natural rainfall (or lack of) can actually negate this, and it all depends on what veggies you’re talking about anyway.
For instance, those heat-loving solanaceae plants (tomatoes, capsicums, eggplants etc) will obviously prefer a good-old-fashioned Canberra summer and, despite the ‘Chatster’s’ wise advice to wait until the horses bolt in Flemington before planting these, sometimes those distracted fillies loiter in the stalls because frosts have been known to hit hard in mid-late November – as many of our region’s decimated grape-growers can attest to after 2025’s tardy jack-frost doozy. Hence why I actually don’t plant, or advise any of my clients to plant, tomatoes until December. In fact some years I’ve planted these even later due to other work/life commitments and still had a decent season picking delicious toms for months on end. As I said, I’ve grown them deep into winter once and often haven’t even got them in the ground until late February. It really can vary significantly year to year so keeping a close eye on the short-medium term forecast all year around is a much better approach than expecting things to be a certain way by a particular date each and every year.
Obviously people can take the guesswork out of it and build cold-frames or greenhouses and plant seeds to then nervously nurse them like premature babies in incubators, but why bother when you can just pay the actual nurseries to do that for you and simply plant advanced seedlings directly in the ground a bit later. Although these will naturally be more expensive to buy, if you only get a few it won’t break the bank and they’ll be strong healthy productive plants so it all balances out in the end given that the greenhouse wouldn’t have been cheap to build or buy either.
And just as many veggies delight in Canberra’s summer heat, others, like those in the fabaceae (e.g. legumes such as peas and beans) and brassicaceae families (e.g. Kale, Broccoli, Brussels sprouts, Cabbage, Cauliflower, Bok Choy, Kohlrabi, Collard etc) can easily tolerate, and in some cases, positively thrive in our frosty winters. For which I happily note and acknowledge that the information proffered by ‘the Chatdog’ on growing winter-veg in Canberra is accurate and useful. So now that it’s ticked over into autumn you can all get out there and start preparing to plant these winter-wonders now that it looks like the summer heat is a thing of the past.
So veggie gardening on the moon (also known as Canberra) is absolutely achievable, and even AI can confirm that, but simply slavishly following general rules won’t always mean you’re successful because the real world doesn’t quite perfectly fit into those theoretical boxes all of the time. And that is where consulting a real human-being with horticultural knowledge and a prolonged lived-experience in Canberra will help you to succeed in growing your own delicious veg all year round ‘on the moon’.