Growing summer vegetables in your garden should not be a nightmare, even for beginner gardeners. Arina Duvenhage put together the Healthy Vegetable course book. The Healthy Vegetable course is for fellow gardeners, from beginner to expert. This course was divided into 10 modules, with module 8 covering summer vegetables. It answers the question what to grow in your summer vegetable garden and how.

The summer vegetables in module 8:

• Corn
• Tomatoes
• Cucumber
• Patty Pan
• Pumpkin
• Baby marrows
• Bell Pepper
• Chillies
• Coriander (Cilantro)
• Lettuce
• Spinach
• Cabbage
• Spring onion
• Chives
• Fennel
• Eggplant (Brinjal)
• Rocket
• Dill
• Basil

For each summer vegetable, Arina explains what type of plant each vegetable is, which season, germination temperature, and what seed method should be used for planting and growing each vegetable.

The module also gives guidance on the germination period, where to plant the vegetable, which months to plant it and which companion plants to include for each vegetable. The ebook module contains a pictorial companion plant A-Z to make identifying companion plants easy.

When discussing growing your own summer vegetables, pests and plant diseases cannot be left out. We have included the most common pests and plant diseases specific to each vegetable plant in your summer vegetables. Pictures were included for easy identification of these pests and diseases too. Examples of common pests include whitefly, aphids, worms, and beetles. Plant diseases include fusarium stalk rot on corn, blight on tomatoes, mildew on pumpkins, and so on. With these identifiers, guidance on pest and plant disease prevention is included in the module.

Garden of Eden Garden School’s approach to gardening, vegetables, fruits, or flowers is rooted in soil health. As such, module 8 specifies the type of soil needed for each vegetable and covers soil conditions. If you would like to learn more about soil health and/or soil organisms, please see our modules on soil, Module 2 and Module 10.