With a vegie garden and a few fruit trees you can forget about supermarkets for a few weeks. A good basic winter veg garden also means that if you suddenly need to save a few hundred dollars you can eat from the garden, with possibly a few eggs from the chooks. Chooks are a veg garden almost-essential. The leftover veg feeds the chooks; the eggs feed you; their manure feeds the garden.

So what should you bung in now? A packet or a punnet of silver beet, because if you do stir fries or vegetable quiche or spinach and fetta triangles or 'spinach' soup, you need a dozen silver beet plants per household. Silver beet are also so hardy that they'll survive heat, cold, drought and knee-high weeds, though they may get a bit spindly with ill treatment. Plant parsley now too. You can add finely chopped parsley to pizza, pasta, salads and even frozen fruit salad. Plant lots, as while it won't die down in winter, it won't grow much either.

Home grown leeks are a luxury, but must be fed well or they become Duchess of Windsor leeks, hard and skinny. Collard seed usually needs to be bought from a specialised seed company. Collards are what you grow if you are nervous about your ability to grow a cabbage, as collards don't heart, and again, are totally, gloriously hardy. Pick them and they grow more leaves, and more, and more.

Then there is kale, which grows wild as a northern European seaside weed and vigorously in the garden. You can buy it frilled, coloured, large leafed, small leafed, and all varieties are good, though if you let kale leaves get too big they ca be tough. Tough kale is 'soup kale', to be shredded finely and cooked for a long time in broth. Young tender kale leaves can be very finely chopped and eaten raw, or cooked chef style, as in 'a delicious portion of roast gryphon served on a bed of wilted kale'.

This is also the time to get rooted. Plant mini carrots - large ones may not have time to grow more than leaves and an orange straggle. Parsnips sown now will need to be watered, fed and watered again to get dinner-ready roots by winter, but you can still manage it. The same with beetroot and spuds - you won't get much of a crop before the frost, but you will get some. Plant garlic now too, and Russian garlic for the giant tubers. Three weeks ago would have been better, but 'now' is a lot better than 'never'. You might just get snow peas if you plant them now, though if it's a cool autumn peas and snow peas won't crop till very early spring, then give you an even bigger and longer harvest for being planted early.

Plant broccoli, cabbages, brussel sprouts, bok choi, English spinach, at least two dozen spring onions, and at least two rows of small winter lettuces like Buttercrunch or Red Mignonette. Add celery, which won't grow enormous before the cold hits us, but you will have tender fragrant celery leaves to add to soup and stews and salads.

If you've never had a vegetable garden before, strangely winter is the best time to begin. Summer gardens are frantic, weeds taking over before your seedlings can do more than poke their heads up, and zucchini turning into monsters if you ignore them for 48 hours.

There are no snakes lurking in the tomatoes in winter; no fruit fly either, or not in our climate, and weed growth is sedate or even non-existent till spring.

Gardens in our climate grow strongly over autumn - there's a rush of new vegetable leaves and fat roots, almost like the 'spring flush', then the veg sit there waiting for you to remember to pick them all winter. The weeds will gallop up in early spring, and most of the remaining veg go to seed, but by then hopefully you will be into your garden routine, picking daily and gaily, and ready with the spring mulch as soon as a weed appears. Speed up the crops with a heat absorbing/reflecting stone mulch, or plant by a concrete path or a brick wall for added warmth.

Passionate gardeners might add a small greenhouse, or drape their garden in clear plastic, or scavenge old windows to make cloches - glass cover so crops grow fast. Those who don't have a garden can turn half the living room into vegetables with grow lights - your household heating bills can warm the garden too. There is a delicious irony in having solar panels turn into 24-hour sunlight for an indoor garden.

A winter veg garden gives security, the knowledge that no matter what, you will eat well. Potato cakes for breakfast, whatever-is-in-the-garden soup for lunch, be it leek or borsht or Potage Crecy, perhaps a Spanish omelette and winter salad for dinner, and a thousand variations on the theme.

And toilet paper? If you run out, try a mignonette lettuce leaf. It's soft, won't block the pipes, decomposes nicely, and is an infinitely renewable resource down your backyard.