Despite the winter chill, we are ready and excited to keep planting, transplanting, designing and improving our backyard gardens! Truly, gardening is a beloved activity that nourishes that body, mind and soul. In this guide, we’ll discuss our top picks for the season: reliable and cold hardy vegetables, pest deterring herbs and flowers, bright and cheerful, pollinator-friendly flowers.
Garden Maintenance
Enrich your soil - use healthy soil. Turn over your soil and add compost, fertilisers like sheep pellets.
Let go of your leftover summer plants.
Rake autumn leaves up.
Clean and fix your garden tools.
Prepare your soil for strawberry and garlic planting.
Mulching will save many of your plants this winter.
Consider staggered planting to ensure continuous harvest.
Edible Garden - Vegetable Picks for the colder weather
It’s time for brassicas (broccoli, broccolini, cabbage and cauliflower) as they can handle the colder weather and can be planted generally all over New Zealand. Buying Awapuni seedlings will give you a good head start. Plant broad beans and peas will thrive in areas without frost.
Stagger Your Planting - lettuce, onions, peas, radish — every 10-14 days.
For the really cold areas down south, you may want to consider planting cavolo nero, beetroot, silverbeet, kale, spinach, garlic, strawberries and onion. These vegetables can survive outside or in ventilated tunnel houses.
Consider cover plants for used garden beds. Cover plants help your soil regain nitrogen content. Beans, peas and wild blue lupins will help improve the nitrogen content of your soil. Closer to spring, you can turnover the soil planted with these cover crops and use these crops as live compost by burying them in the soil. This process will improve your soil structure.
Plant to fertilise your plants. When days get shorter and colder, your plants need all the help they can get.
Awapuni Nurseries garlic seedlings are now available for home and eventually commercial growers. Our garlic seedlings are roughly 15cm high, carefully hand-shelled and hand-planted. Ideally, garlic is planted in colder months (from June - July) because it needs the cold for the bulb to properly develop. We have prepared an extensive garlic planting guide for you here.
Our strawberry seedlings are here, you may add your name on the notifications list for all our strawberry bundles and products that you may be interested in! Note that planting garlic next to strawberry plants can be beneficial as they deter pests. We suggest planting garlic in another container and position it next to strawberry beds.
Very soon, we’ll have seed potatoes on our website too.
Flower Garden
Colourful pansy flowers, calendula, stock are hardy annuals. They bloom generously and love the cold weather. They can be great companions with many beautiful flowering plants like roses, lobelia and vegetables like cabbages!
Hardy Herbs
If you are thinking of adding herbs to your winter garden, the cold-hardy ones are parsley, oregano and rocket. Herbs are excellent companion plants for strawberries! They are natural pest deterrents. You may want to consider planting herbs in containers next to strawberries and allow some of them to flower to bring in pollinators this colder season. Sage, Dill, Chives, Thyme are herbs that are great to plant next to strawberries. See all our herb bundles here.
Natives
Winter is still a good time to plant all natives as they can thrive in New Zealand’s unique climate. Native flaxes, hebes, grasses, and trees thrive even in winter.
