I have grown vegetables in Dayboro for years, and the one thing I learned early is that most planting guides are wrong for us. They are written for Sydney, or worse, for England. We sit in the subtropics, up the back of Moreton Bay, and our seasons do not line up with the books.
So this is the short version for our patch, a subtropical vegetable planting guide written for the people who actually live here. What goes in the ground, and roughly when. If you garden anywhere from Dayboro through Brisbane and across South East Queensland, this is your zone.
Our summers are hot and wet. Real wet. The humidity rots a tomato on the vine before it ripens if you plant it at the wrong time. Our winters are mild and dry, and that is when the patch actually goes mad. In Dayboro we get a frost now and then in the low spots, which a Brisbane gardener does not have to think about, so I am always a week or two behind town on the tender stuff.
The trick is simple. Plant the leafy and the brassica crops into autumn and winter. Hold the heat lovers like tomato, capsicum and eggplant for the shoulder of spring, not the middle of summer. Get that one thing right and half your problems are gone.
This shifts month to month, so I do not hardcode it here. We keep a live tool that reads your postcode and tells you exactly what suits this month for your zone. It covers the whole country, but for us it lands on subtropical.
See what to plant this monthFull subtropical crop list
| Time of year | What I am putting in |
|---|---|
| Autumn (Mar to May) | Brassicas, lettuce, silverbeet, peas, carrots, beetroot, onions. The best window we have. |
| Winter (Jun to Aug) | More of the same, plus broad beans. Watch the frost in the low paddocks. |
| Spring (Sep to Nov) | Now the tomatoes, capsicum, beans, cucumber, zucchini. Get them in before the wet. |
| Summer (Dec to Feb) | Sweet potato, snake bean, kang kong, the heat and humidity crops. Most other things sulk. |
A Dayboro note. Since years our rainfall runs well above what the Bureau pins on the Brisbane gauge, so our wet season is wetter and the soil stays heavy longer. If your beds do not drain, raise them. I lost a whole bed of carrots one February learning that, and I am still a bit annoyed about it.
Dayboro.au is where I keep the local weather, the events and the community side. The growing side has grown into its own thing called Garden Buddy, where the planting calendars, the price tracker and the harvest tools all live properly. Same data, just the right home for it.