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Jo McCarroll suggests jobs to do in the edible garden.

Can you believe it’s November, my very dear chums!

There’s so much you can sow and plant this month that the challenge is holding back… a successive approach of little and often is a better idea than packing all your available growing space with vegetables that will all be ready at once. Keep sowing every sort of leafy green, seed for lettuce, rocket, spinach, coriander (maybe give that afternoon shade in hot places), spring onions, basil and every Asian green can be sprinkled anywhere you have a gap. Direct sow beetroot, radishes and carrots everywhere, and swedes and turnips in southern parts, and direct sow sweetcorn (in blocks rather than rows to ensure even pollination of the kernels). You can direct sow the quicker cucurbits such as zucchini, cucumbers, gherkins and (the smaller) pumpkin varieties or plant them as seedlings; rockmelons and watermelons can be planted as seedlings now too. Direct sow every sort of bean (dwarf, climbing or shell out) and plant more seedlings of tomatoes, chillies, eggplants and peppers, plant kūmara tipu, yams and more main crop potatoes (but give them psyllid protection if required).

Every garden pest loves this time of year

Everything is growing like mad including the pest population! Depending on where you live, you might have slugs and snails; aphids, mealybug, thrips and whiteflies, pest moths and butterflies and their chewing larvae; green vege bugs; and TPP or tomato-potato psyllid (the psyllid population tends to peak in December but monitor for their arrival by hanging yellow sticky traps this month: not in itself a treatment but it lets you know when to treat). I am not actually an advocate of most of the companion planting tips you commonly see shared (planting basil with tomatoes in no way changes the flavour of tomatoes and that is a hill I will die on). But I absolutely support adding buckwheat, alyssum and phacelia to bring in predatory insects, and also using trap crops which are more attractive to the pest you are targeting. Try cleome and calendula to attract green vege bugs, nasturtium for aphids, marigolds for nematodes, chervil for slugs. (Any other suggestions? I’d love to hear them). When a trap crop becomes overrun with a pest, remove it or thin it out.

Fancy homegown watermelons?

Watermelons are, it is fair to say, on the tricky side: they need a long, hot summer and in less than perfect conditions, might not ripen perfectly or at all. If your climate is marginal, stick to rockmelons which are more reliable and quicker to harvest, or go for a mini watermelon like ‘Sugar Baby’. You can plant melon seedlings outdoors this month, provided it’s reliably warm enough. If temperatures are still in the single digits at night, hold off until it warms up). Give them a sunny spot and water while the fruit is setting (once the fruit has formed, ease off the watering for sweeter fruit). The vines have a tendency to sprawl all over the garden, but if you give them support they will climb and at my place I think they do a little better as climbers. The fruit is heavy so need support with something like a fabric cradle when it forms: you can buy products designed to do this, but to be honest, old tights or stripes of fabric are just as good.

Try growing your own peanuts

There’s work going on right now in the potential of peanuts as a commercial crop for New Zealand: Plant & Food ran a trial growing peanuts in three Northland locations, with the first harvest at the start of last year. Peanuts like it warm – a soil temperature of around 18 degrees is ideal – so it would be chancy growing them in the soil across quite a bit of New Zealand, but you could still give them a go in a pot which will always stay a bit warmer. You sometimes see peanut seed for sale, indeed Awapuni Nurseries has sold the plant as a seedling at times. But you can also plant raw peanuts themselves, like the ones you might buy at Bin Inn. Take the hard shell off but leave the skin on. Once the plants start flowering, you mound them up at the base (a bit like potatoes). The flowers eventually bend towards the soil and the peanuts form underground. They should be ready to harvest in around April, just remember to save some to plant the next season.

I was amused to hear about a melon ripeness app you can download – it analyses the sound when you tap a watermelon to let you know if it’s ripe! Admittedly the reviews for it are not great, so it’s worth knowing the analogue method… tap, if you hear “punk”, it’s ripe; “pink” or “pank” then wait. Also check the stem joining the fruit to the vine. If it’s ripe, it should be dry.

Liming the soil: a quick explainer

You often see the tip to add garden lime or lime the soil. As you probably know, lime reduces the acidity of the soil by raising the pH – while a pH of 6.5-7 is pretty good for most edibles, plants can’t take up nutrients if the soil is too acidic. I read a good explainer in Nelson horticulturist Bill Brett’s book The Home Orchard where he iterates the forms of lime available in New Zealand: garden lime, or calcium carbonate; dolomite lime, a mix of calcium carbonate and magnesium carbonate; and gypsum, or calcium sulphate. Bill recommends a 50/50 mix of dolomite lime and garden lime once a year for most soils (you want more calcium than magnesium in your soil and excessive use of dolomite lime can lead to magnesium buildup over time). Gypsum doesn’t reduce acidity but, like lime, it conditions clay soil, supplies calcium and improves phosphate availability so that makes it a good choice for acid-loving plants such as blueberries.