Your home is rented and you'll be moving in six months, so there is no point planting a garden ...
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Except large amounts of garden are no more trouble to pack and transport than your bed. If you've got the energy to move another couple of beds - or can borrow or hire the energy - then it can be simple to grow a garden to take with you.
Vegies? Plant a wicking bed, one of those portable above-ground gardens that stores its water at the base so that plants like tomatoes or silver beet or luscious winter lettuces need less watering.
Water is heavy, so time your removal if possible so that you've harvested the veg and let the soil dry out, though if you have half a dozen friends with muscles and a trailer and a not-too-long journey, you could take the garden with you, tomato plants and all.
I gave ''potato bags'' as gifts a few years ago. Potato bags are fun for kids, but also easily transportable. They are long canvas bags in which you plant a seed potato into soil, then keep adding soil or mulch around the stem as the potato plant grows, till finally the leaves die back and - hopefully - you have a bag almost filled with a harvest of potatoes. It never quite works as well as that, but enough for kids to grab each spud as if it's a treasure grown in their backyard.
Moveable fruit trees? Think dwarf trees in large pots: dwarf apples, cherries, almonds, mulberries, peaches, nectarines, lemons, or trees like native limes, Tahitian limes that will naturally bonsai themselves in a pot. There are small fruits, too, that grow extremely well in pots, like blueberries (grow them near a tap so they are easily watered), raspberries, currants, goji berries, strawberries grown in strawberry planters, or passionfruit and kiwi fruit that can twine along a trellis but will grow back happily if pruned right back before you move.
Hanging baskets can be filled with flowers, especially pansies, primula and poppies. Many of the smaller roses developed for pots do well in hanging baskets too, as does bougainvillea. Canberra's winters don't suit the modern, less vigorous bougainvillea, but the old-fashioned purple one - the kind that can take over a hectare up in Queensland - grows well in a sunny spot, survives drying out, and if kept confined to a hanging basket or a large pot will find it impossible to invade your trees, bedroom or the house next door.
Red-stemmed rhubarb also looks surprisingly elegant in hanging baskets, as do red frilly lettuces, and just about any herb you can think of.
Grow a ''garden on a rack'' - a rack placed across a sunny window with pots of succulents, thyme, oregano, basil and other sun lovers hung from it. Be wary of green walls, though, if you expect to move house. Theoretically most green walls can travel with you, but the space behind them may be dingy, and need major restoration, costly in both time and money.
Many plants are easily transplanted. Almost any bulb will multiply happily in your rented garden, then you can dig up the bounty when formant, or quickly potted and watered if not. Shallow-rooted succulents are easily moved, as are thymes, alyssum and just about any annual flower as long as they are quickly given a new well-watered home. There is also the ''plant them pot and all'' trick - cover the pot tops with mulch then haul the whole lot out when you are ready to carry them off.
But every time you plant something in a rented garden, imagine leaving small treasures for the next inhabitant: a row of daffodils that will spring up and surprise and delight them, a rosemary bush for fragrance and winter bee food, or a single red and totally unexpected tulip, or thyme or white alyssum planted in the gaps between the paving.
I lived in a rented house once that had a bare front garden when we moved in, which suddenly blossomed with a thousand daffodils as soon as the days began to lengthen, variety after variety flowering one after the other for months. I have never forgotten the shock and joy, left by a previous inhabitant. Everything we grow is a gift to others, each leaf part of the ecology of the world. But some plants - like that gift of daffodils - become a memory that remains all our lives.
This week I am:
- Watering the garden, with actual water. From a hose! Or possibly not bothering to water, as it may rain again, with genuine wet stuff from the sky. The garden is in shock from all the lavish growth, and so am I, but the newly planted native limes, figs and macadamias are doing well, as are the veg we will hopefully eat all winter.
- Staring at the choko vine hoping to hypnotise it into fruiting now, not three weeks before the first frost. The vine is big enough to fruit, and the days are getting shorter. Why can't it be reasonable, accept that it's autumn, and give us a harvest now?
- Picking tomatoes from the bushes that seemed to die to the drought, but have suddenly made a leap upwards and outwards and begun to fruit;
- Also picking asparagus, which I didn't pick in spring because the plants were stressed in the heat and dry. Now the asparagus have lavish water they are putting out fat shoots, which we are eating;
- Grinning at the bananas, which have also perked up and might even flower and fruit again this winter in the warm pile of rocks behind the bathroom;
- Watering the tops of every tree fern in the garden. About half have put out green shoots, but I have seen tree ferns sulk for three years before leafing again, so I'm not giving up on the others yet.