A punnet of ‘Dynasty’ has 8 seedlings for less than $3.00, so you can afford to flash out. They spring into flower in pots on in the ground in just a week or two and I give mine a dose of fertilizer every couple of weeks, but even if you forget, they still flower and I’ve never found anything that eats them! So how good is that?

You still have plenty of time to put a few late tomatoes into the vegetable garden too. Ironically the early varieties are also the late cultivars and even a tall mid season such as ‘Mighty Red’ will continue to crop for the next 3-4 months this year, since the season is so late, compared to the average. Make sure you keep pulling up the ‘Common Milk Thistle’ since it harbours the brown leafhopper that spreads a disease called ‘Big bud’ to your tomatoes and eggplants, which greatly reduces their yields.

Every summer produces a couple of new weeds or rather weeds that find the season to their liking and so multiply rapidly. This year it’s “Caustic weed” Chamaesyce prostrata and it’s a native plant too. It makes a totally flat grey leaf plant with red stems and a milky sap when bruised that spreads to smother other plants when humid conditions exist. If you like to water with hose in hand at night, I bet you have it already. Just chipping it off easily controls it.

This is the season when the blue flowering “Morning Glory” Ipomea purpurea and its relatives, the white and pink flowering forms of the “Field Bindweed”, Convolvulus arvensis, go ballistic. All three are resistant to an spraying with glyphosate and only an arboricide such as ‘Axit’ will do the needful. Cut the mat of growth to the ground and daub the recommended mixture onto the fresh cuts.

Ignore these creepers at your peril! There is an annual Ipomea tricolor which is sold as a packet seed mix of climbers, but that variety is not invasive in my experience. There is a native white Ipomea that can cause temporary blindness if rubbed in the eyes, so you might treat all of these with some caution.

A dead easy to grow summer veggie for a hot spot is the eggplant or aubergine. The large purple types are known as ‘Supreme’ and make the traditional Greek moussaka. They are a little bitter and need salting on the cut fruits before cooking to remove the bitter taste. Expect 2-4 fruits from each bush.

The long thin black to purple Lebanese eggplant fruits is not bitter and don’t need salting and best of all they set up to 20 fruits per plant. The white egg shaped fruits (same size too) you see in the markets are the favourite of south east Asian cooks and seldom grown outside those communities, but the seed is readily available at Asian grocers, so try it by all means. The Lao have a tiny white and green eggplant that is exceedingly bitter and about the size of a small grape, but popular in that community and with Thais too.

You still have plenty of time to put a few late tomatoes into the vegetable garden too. Ironically the early varieties are also the late cultivars and even a tall mid season such as ‘Mighty Red’ will continue to crop for the next 3 months this year, since the season is so late, compared to the average. Make sure you keep pulling up the ‘Common Milk Thistle’ since it harbors the brown leafhopper that spreads a disease called ‘Big bud’ to your tomatoes and eggplants, which greatly reduces their yields.

I often get asked ‘how to get rid of bamboos?’ Well it’s actually quite easily controlled by using glyphosate, as are most invasive perennial grasses. Getting the foliage to wet, is one problem, but if you use a non-ionic wetting agent and any gardening outlet sells this, then you will be successful and the glyphosate stays active. Household detergent will not work as the alkaloids in it break down the glyphosate and render it useless.

This is a great time to plant more parsley, chives and lettuce. No garden ever seems to have enough. Plant ‘spring onions’ too. Although it’s not spring, don’t worry, the ‘White Lisbon Onion’ used by most local nurseries as their ‘spring onion’, thrives when planted now and seldom bolts to seed.

If you have detected lumps on your wattles or gum trees, they are probably ‘galls’ pronounced as in the Francophile type of Gaul. They are tiny maggot like creatures that have had an egg laid by a tiny wasp and as their progeny grow they abort the cells of the host resulting in the large lumps on the leaves. Some look like seedpods. Cut them off to control as the alternative of using systemic insecticides is not that successful.

Gardening in the south is definitely different to much of the Adelaide plain. Firstly you need to become familiar with gypsum, that amazingly cheap compound that changes the structure of alkaline clay soil and improves its drainage. The best quality looks like white talc powder and the cheapest and least effective looks like orange sand. Spread it on the surface at the rate of 300 grams per square metre. No need to dig it in. It works within an hour on moist soil.

For keen gardeners there is always the temptation of buying plants on impulse rather than considering what will grow best on your soil type. If you are of the first type, expect problems. The local alkaline clay causes lots of plants to lock up iron, which we call a lime-induced-chlorosis (the old L-I-C factor). There’s loads of iron in these soils, that’s why our clay is red, it’s just that being so alkaline it is not available, so sensitive plants get yellow leaves while their veins stay green.