Most of you will have seen reports of lettuce shortages in the eastern states with prices reaching all time highs - as much as $12 per lettuce!

There's pretty much never been a better time to get your own backyard patch underway.

What can we plant in July?

Lots! Artichoke, beetroot, dill, some of the Asian greens although be careful as they may go to seed very quickly, English spinach, leeks, and why not try potatoes?

We recently bought some seed potatoes for the school's kitchen garden and all year 4/5 classes are now growing them in bags.

You can grow them in any container or even straight into straw or your compost pile.

Interestingly the tip to get a high yield is to cover green plant growth every 10 centimetres or so with soil, leaving only a few centimetres of green tips sticking out the top.

This will send a message to the plant to stop producing leaves and to start producing more roots - and therefore more potatoes - from those nodes. So clever!

You can do this two or three times as your potato plants grow in height.

If you are looking for a very cheap or free activity you can do on your own or with the kids during the school holidays this is the one for you!

Search around the house for the following items and you'll likely find them all.

You can literally choose a sprouting potato from your pantry (it's been reported you need to purchase seed potatoes but this isn't strictly true - you'll still get quite a good yield from store bought potatoes that have started to sprout in your pantry), find a bucket or container or bag (make sure these have drainage holes), throw 10cm of soil in the bottom, place your potatoes on top sprouts facing upwards, cover them with another 10cm of soil, and keep in a sunny spot remembering to water only if it doesn't rain.

Then follow the tip to cover green leaf growth with soil and come November you'll be harvesting your own homegrown potatoes.

Strawberries also like to be planted now.

I tend to use pots or containers purely because the runners from these plants can spread just about anywhere.

And if you raise them off the ground you're more likely to get to the fruit before the slaters do.

We will have some lovely large strawberry plants for sale in July on the Honesty Stall, all transplanted from my home garden and then potted up by the kids last month.

Sue Gibson recently gifted the school garden a purpose built strawberry planter but you can make your own using an old washing basket. Check Google it if interested.

Last but certainly not least are the peas - snow peas, snap sugar peas, and standard green peas.

This year I found some purple podded peas in the school seed collection we estimated to be at least five years old.

The kids and I thought we'd try planting them not really knowing if we'd get any popping up at all. Of the fifteen planted, we saw ten germinate. Not a bad rate!

The lesson there for some seeds at least, most seeds in my opinion, is to never assume that a past expiry date means unviable.

Don't throw out your seeds!

Other gardening jobs - weeding, fertilising, pruning citrus and spraying for leaf miner, possibly spraying for leaf curl if your stone fruit have fully dropped their leaves and are forming buds, reduce mowing to once a month and move the blades up in height a level or two, and maintain all undercover plants or inside pots on a watering regime as when it's raining outside we tend to forget not everything is in a position to access it.

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