9–15 November 2026
After a week in which the traditional moon calendar effectively told us to stop planting and clean up our shit, we get moving again.
Melbourne reaches the new moon at 6.02 pm on Monday 9 November, opening a fresh lunar cycle. The traditional planting calendar then gives us a strong leafy period from Tuesday, followed by another useful leafy window running through much of Friday to Sunday.
As always, this is gardening tradition, not celestial legislation.
If the soil is waterlogged, don’t plant into mud because Scorpio apparently sent you a memo.
This week’s traditional emphasis: leaves
This is the week for the things we eat mainly above ground for their leaves:
lettuce, silverbeet, rocket, spinach, parsley, coriander and other leafy herbs.
November is also properly into Melbourne’s spring-to-summer transition now. Depending on your particular microclimate, beans, tomatoes, basil, cucumber, zucchini, sweet corn and other warm-season crops are coming into play as temperatures establish themselves. Gardening Australia’s November guides include a broad range of these crops across temperate and cool zones.
But don’t turn that into a shopping list.
Plant what you will actually eat.
A garden full of vegetables nobody wants for dinner is simply an unusually labour-intensive ornamental garden.
WEATHER CHECK BEFORE PUBLISHING
[MICK/EGOR: Add 2–4 sentences from the latest Melbourne BOM forecast here. Check rain already fallen, coming heat, wind and overnight temperatures. Adjust watering advice accordingly.]
The important question isn’t merely whether rain is forecast.
Stick your finger in the soil.
We are measuring what the plant’s roots are experiencing, not whether a cloud passed over Tullamarine.
From the prototype garden: the nursery
The little hothouse is beginning to assume its proper job as the garden nursery.
Seeds, cuttings, clones, fresh punnets and hardening plants all have different requirements, but one problem repeatedly kills the lot:
somebody forgets to water them.
Years ago I dealt with that through a passive capillary system — reservoir below, broad wick, capillary matting, slotted tray, then another tray carrying rockwool blocks or conventional punnets.
Nothing particularly clever.
That’s why it works.
A 100-litre tank sitting outside will eventually gravity-feed the system. No pump at this stage. Gravity has been providing water pressure since considerably before Bunnings opened.
Separate pump-up sprayers will handle fine misting, and later a different sprayer can be reserved for mild foliar feeding of older seedlings.
The idea is not to automate gardening out of existence.
It is to automate the stupid repetitive failure points.
Companion thought: let something flower
Coriander and parsley aren’t failures because they bolt.
If you have enough for the kitchen, let one plant complete the job it was born to do.
Flowers provide another layer of resources for insects moving through the garden.
That will become increasingly important in our enclosed prototype because beneficial visitors don’t appear by magic merely because we approve of biodiversity.
We need to feed them.
Dirty job of the week
Start one succession tray.
Not fifty varieties.
Choose something you regularly eat and sow a small amount that will follow what is already growing.
The aim eventually is not merely:
What can I plant?
It is:
When will I need the next one?
That may turn out to be one of the most useful questions in the entire TEC project.
