What vegies can I plant now?

TIA...

My DH is finally letting me convert the top garden bed into the beginnings of a vegetable patch.

But I have never had one before, tomatoes and herbs are the extent of my edible growing plants.

What I would love to know, is what vegies can I put in given that its summer now? And I do have a tank to water them :)
- Oh yeah, and ones that aren't favourites of snails would be nice too. If there is such a thing lol.

The space is about 2 metres long but only about half a metre or so wide. I don't want anything that will spread too far I guess either in this case.

I can't wait to hear and then fooff off shopping.

I think its a bit late for most things. I just heard that if I hurry I can plant my watermelons this weekend. Sorry im not much help.

Maybe check out the nursery and read the labels.

You might find this useful Monthly planting calendar
Also if you go to the Digger's Club and download their annual catalouge it has a map that you can use as a guide.

what a great link dach!!

Thanks heaps Dach. I love to just have an idea of what I can do before I hit the nursery and actually buy them.

Lettuce is easy to grow and you can plant it now but it grows really fast and goes to seed quickly in this hot weather so keep a close eye on it.

we've just put in more lettuce, capsicum and more corn. with all the cold we've had recently, everything has been delayed a little - and last year we were planting successfully up til late December. we're going to put peas and beans in soon i think...

dach- my lettuce is going to see, I think that's what it is, haven't grown it before, just noticed when we came back from holidays. What do I do? Is it going to die now??

I agree on the lettuce, it's great always having it fresh for salads!!!!!!

Once it goes to seed it starts to get bitter and also instead of having a compact head it will get a bit more of stalk.

Damn, so you can't do anything about it??
It's getting really tall and not so bushy :(

Hi I'm in the same predicament, not moving into my house until this week. I'm going to get some herbs & lettuce in quick smart and see if I can find some more established cherry tom bushes at the nursery - I'll see what else they have there in established seedlings - look for things that ripen quickly (ie small tomatoes, miniature eggplants, bush pumpkins) and late varieties.

The easiest way to work out what you can plant is to work out your growing season.

So for instance, the last frost is, the 1st November and the first frost is the 28 Feb (keeping this simple for my preggie brain).. so that gives us a growing seaons of 4 months or roughly 120 days (is my maths right?).

Seed companies such as eden, and I think on the back of the packets of commercial seeds, will tell you that the seeds will pop up in 7-21 days, and that you can harvest in, lets say 60 days. So all you have to do is work out how many days you have left in the growing season to figure out what you can grow.
The growing season depends on the soil temperature and when you have the first frost - so if you are willing to baby your vegies or create microclimates you can keep some vegies going a little longer.

Of course you can rely on the planting calendars, which can be useful, but i've been caught out a few times with their generalisations.

Depending how keen you want to get, you may want to keep a weather diary, where you record your first and last frosts.

Ohh and the question about the lettuce going to see - let it go to seed and try seed saving (depending on the variety - you might have seed for next season - if it isn't hybrid).

how did you all go?