1. Firstly, if you don't prepare a vegie patch now, you will have no chance of eating just-picked, firm zucchini smaller than your little finger, the perfect size to eat zucchini. Sauté them whole or slice them and slide them onto a toothpick to bake in a hot oven for about 10 minutes, possibly with mini tomatoes in between each slice, pricked so they don't explode, with a few leaves of basil.
Almost every vegie gardener in Canberra will try to give away zucchinis by January, but they probably won't offer you the tiny ones, often with the blossom still attached. Those will go straight into the pan and you will be given quite nice medium-size zucchini, partly because the tiny ones will have been eaten but also because they shrivel in a day or two - they need to be munched the same day. The blossoms can be stuffed and fried.
2. You will have half a summer and all of autumn of fat, juicy tomatoes that are impossible to slice unless you have a magic knife, or slit the skin in four places, briefly place in almost-boiling water, then peel off the skin. The effort is worth it - the cliché that no supermarket tomato can be compared to a home-ripened tomato is true.
3. If you plant seed in October, in three years you will have asparagus that makes you suddenly understand why asparagus was traditionally both a luxury and an aphrodisiac, and corn that doesn't taste of plastic, or worse, has been frozen and has the texture of plastic too.
4. Peas may become your favourite dish, and they are mine, possibly the world's most delicious vegetable but only if they are a variety grown for flavour, not for maximum cropping. Try Greenfeast, or tall-growing Telephone peas that need a two-metre trellis to climb up. Both varieties handle the cold well and can be planted now.
My favourite variety is the Novella Leafless Shelling pea. It has a mass of tendrils that allow it to photosynthesise enough to give a richly flavoured and prolific crop, though it does look as though it's been hit by a horde of snails. Sugarsnap peas that you can eat pod and all are superb picked fresh, though I prefer them podded. The 'Sugar Anne' variety is often considered the sweetest, and doesn't need a trellis or staking.
5. You will be able to make dinner faster than a take-away can arrive. Splodge some extra virgin olive oil in a pan, add tomatoes and just about any other spare veg in the garden, cook lightly and you'll have the topping for a pizza (keep the bases and the cheese in the freezer), pasta (keep the dried pasta in the cupboard), white, brown or purple rice (ditto), or fat baked potatoes in their jackets. Add chicken, fish, prawns, ham, or hot salami and a scatter of grated cheese on top if desired.
6. You'll spend more time in the fresh air and less in the supermarket. With fresh veg - and strawberries, rhubarb, raspberries, blueberries, thornless blackberries plus tree fruit - you only need shop once a week to buy staples, and dairy. If you don't go for milk or cream, you can stretch this to a month or three.
7. Unless your vegie seedling punnets are eaten by snails and you need to replace them four times (seeds are cheaper than punnets), you will save hundreds and possibly thousands of dollars per annum, depending on your canniness as a cook and gardener. (Save an empty ice-cream container and cut a door in it to get rid of the snails. Add snail bait to make a rain-proof bait station. A metre-long length of polypipe works even better - snails love the smoothness on their tummies, and will conveniently die inside the pipe so no other species can eat them).
8. You will gain a deserved reputation as a cook simply from the deliciousness of your lightly boiled carrots, your new potatoes topped with butter, or tiny broad beans or green tomato kasundi, made to use up the surplus and an excellent gift.
9. Preparing your vegie garden now will give the weeds a chance to germinate, whether you dig your beds or pile 60cm of home-made compost on the lawn for an above-ground garden - do not add newspaper, as it will become an impermeable barrier between the soil and the compost.
Rake the tiny weeds away twice before planting, or cover the bare soil with clear plastic. The weeds will germinate in the moist heat, then rot.
10. Watch a kid's face as they scoff snow peas straight from the vine or pull up round carrots or discover that cauliflowers can be purple, briefly boiled then covered in batter and eaten with tomato sauce. If you want your kids to eat their veg, give them a seed catalogue, let them choose the varieties, and then pick and guzzle.
