I'll often head into my garden to ponder a problem, sitting with it while pulling weeds or digging deep into the soil to see what I'll find there. When the problem is actually about what I should do in the garden I try and conjure my Pop and ask him what he'd do. Often the answer I hear back is "pull it out, start again". Brutal.

While my Mum's advice on the garden is always sound, week-to-week I turn to the no-nonsense voices of Australian newspaper garden columnists of the 1940s and '60s, particulary the Herald Sun's former garden writer Olive Mellor and the Daily Telegraph's P.J. Hurley. 

I regularly dip into Hurley's This Week In Your Garden; a collection of his garden columns signed off in his pen name Waratah. In November, he points to the success, in 1962, of the year's jacaranda showing. He writes: "too much autumn and winter rain spoils their blossom beauty". If writing his column in 2017, he'd have probably said the same of this year's spectacular blooms.

Olive Mellor's notes in a 1940 Garden Lover's Log, written to aid the Australian Red Cross, mention how, in the last weeks of November, to get the best out of tomatoes. 

"Continue to pinch back the leafy side shoots from the tomatoes. The object of the pinching out of the growths is to conserve the strength of the plant for fruit development," she writes.

Both Hurley and Mellor say the bulk of the garden's work for summer and autumn cropping should be done by the first weeks of December, which means I need to get a wriggle on. 

I hope your garden is faring well and ready to weather the coming summer.