Supermarket food supply shortages provide an opportunity to grown your own fruit and vegetables

It was a lovely time, though I wish I'd known that I'd eventually make enough money to buy things like school uniforms. I'm also glad I don't need to do it now. Making your own soap and splitting enough wood to keep the stove going day and night needs a younger body than mine, not to mention many hours and no writing deadlines.

But in these days of supermarket insecurity, it's good to know what to do, how to do it - and that we can grow or make all we need, at least for a few weeks of a disaster.

This is the perfect time to grow your own autumn, winter and spring meals. Plant the seeds of your winter and spring crops like beetroot, carrots, cauliflower, many kinds of cabbages, celery, broccoli, brussels sprouts, and collards, endive, fennel, kale, kohl rabi, leeks, parsley, radish, spinach, silver beet, turnips, and salad greens. Bung Tom Thumb tomatoes in a pot, to bear through winter on a sunny windowsill, as well as new tomato plants in the ground to give a massive autumn crop to freeze or turn into chutney or kasundi. Bung in a fresh lot of zucchini now, too, unless you're sick of the blighters.

Plant more beans, basil, sweet corn, lettuce, silver beet, and potatoes for autumn eating. Bush pumpkins put in now and well fed will give small but delicious fruit. Make a new garden bed for strawberries, herbs, artichokes and asparagus if you feel like it, or even soapwort for shampoo, lavatera bushes for toilet paper, sugar beet for the sugar to add to ground nuts and egg whites from the chooks for macaroons.

And if you are exhausted just reading that list, bung in a dozen silver beet seedlings, two dozen parsley seedlings, a dozen green and a dozen red cabbage plus a sprinkle of buttercrunch or red mignonette lettuces each week till the soil cools down, i.e. you can no longer sit on it comfortable, assuming it ever stops raining and is dry enough.

If you want just a bit further into the backyard security zone, add lots of carrots and potatoes, and you'll have calories, vitamins and antioxidants, not to mention heathy, relaxing exercise and a feeling of security. Just don't let the snails or possums eat the lot before you do. (That will be the subject of another article).

In the past four decades, our garden had fed us through drought, more drought, then even worse drought with bushfires, followed by floods, though the harvests have varied with the years. The summer of 2019/20 gave us an unexpected and massive crop of dates, as well a vast harvest of bunya nuts. This year's single bunya nut missed falling on me a fortnight ago. It's the size of a football on steroids instead of the usual "fill a wheelbarrow" monster.

We have varieties of avocadoes, lemons, limes, nuts, oranges and apples to feed us all year round, assuming the late apple varieties can be stored from August to December and the parrots don't eat them, plus over a hundred other kinds of fruit, many of which are not delicious, just interesting. But there has never has been a year when everything has fruited, and we also deliberately and inadvertently provide the tucker for a large range of wildlife. The varied lilly pillies and cumquats are for the birds (and curious kids). The apples are supposed to be mine. Sadly, as I don't speak either parrot or possum, we have yet to reach agreement on this.

Usually we have too much of a few things and need to give some away, but lack of watering and, this year, too much mist and lack of pollination, means most trees don't bear each year.

We also have at least four breeds of chook, especially a "backyard special" that has been locally cross bred for at least 20 generations, and you will have eggs all year: scrambled, souffled, soufflopped, omelette, quiche, poached or to give substance to a potato cake. The chooks eat all the fruit and veg we don't want and can be bothered to lug down to them, plus our leftovers, and commercial chook food for the times they feel neglected. There is no waste when you have a compost bin and chooks.

Humans evolved with food growing around us. We still feel good with dinner or a delightful snack harvestable nearby, though not all of us necessarily want to do the growing and picking and cooking.

It wasn't a coincidence that after the bushfires a lot of the "weeds" that sprang up were edible if you knew how when to pick them and how to cook them, even if they weren't not sweet and tender. This is a generous planet. In times of pandemic and other nervousness, it's good to remind ourselves of that, and possibly plant some cabbages.