What practical gardening advice does ABC Gardening Australia magazine offer?

Updated

ABC Gardening Australia magazine's website, gardeningaustraliamag.com.au, offers practical home-gardening advice organised into two main structures: a topic-based Advice section and a climate-based Planting Guide and Garden Planner. The advice covers edible gardening, pruning, composting and mulching, soil, propagating, pests and diseases, and lawn care. It is written for Australian home gardeners and is tied to the magazine's monthly issue and the ABC TV show. Use it if you want general, seasonal guidance for an Australian garden; it is not a personalised diagnosis service for a specific plant problem.

What topics the advice covers

The site groups its practical content under a clear set of headings:

  • Edible gardening – growing food crops
  • Pruning – when and how to cut back plants
  • Composting and mulching – building soil and feeding beds
  • Soil – understanding and improving garden soil
  • Propagating – raising new plants from existing ones
  • Pests and diseases – identifying and managing problems
  • Lawn care – maintaining and reviving turf

Around these sit plant-specific and design sections: Planting guide, Garden planner, Plant index, and categories for roses, citrus, native plants, edible gardens, groundcover plants, shrubs and trees, grasses and strappy-leaf plants, and indoor plants. There are also sections on supporting wildlife, feature gardens, meet the gardener, small gardens, and travel, plus what's on, events, and competitions.

How the advice is organised by season and climate

Two tools do the seasonal and climate work:

  • The Planting Guide answers "what to plant when."
  • The Garden Planner lets you create a planting calendar for your climate zone.

The magazine content itself is seasonal. The November issue, for example, is framed around spring: flowers coming into bloom, from native Geraldton wax to cottage-garden favourites, and a free spring e-book on planting and planning for the warmer months. So the practical advice is not a static reference — it rotates with the Australian growing calendar, and the planner is the mechanism for matching that advice to your own climate zone rather than a single national timetable.

Finding advice for a specific problem

If you arrive with a task rather than a browse, the site's structure points you to a route:

  1. Start from the Advice menu if your problem is a general technique — pruning, soil, compost, pests, lawn.
  2. Use the Plant index or Planting guide if your question is about a particular plant or what to put in the ground now.
  3. Use the Garden planner to convert general advice into dates for your climate zone.
  4. Check the current issue — "In This Issue" — because feature advice is published monthly and tied to the season.

How expert advice and common mistakes are presented

The site mixes instructional articles with experience-based content. Two examples from the homepage show the tone:

  • "Rookie errors" — in the latest issue, Chloe Foster reveals 20 common mistakes and how to avoid them. This is the reader-mistake format: naming what goes wrong rather than only describing the ideal method.
  • "Create a layered garden to attract birds" — framed as a problem and a method: turn a quiet yard into an ecosystem where birds feed, shelter and nest by building the garden in layers, from the ground up to the canopy.

Other pieces follow the same pattern of a specific plant or task plus practical guidance: growing correas as dependable backbone shrubs, growing grevilleas, attracting native bees, and reviving your lawn.

What it is and what it is not

The site is the online arm of ABC Gardening Australia magazine, described as full of plants, gardens and inspiring Australian gardeners, with expert advice and tips for the home garden. It links to a TV show, back issues, and a Subscribe option, and includes a Marketplace with product showcase and buyer's guides.

It is not a tool that diagnoses your specific plant from a photo, and the advice is general rather than tailored to your exact soil, microclimate or pest outbreak. For a precise identification or treatment decision, treat the site as a starting point and confirm against a local source. Pricing and subscription terms are not stated in the material available here, so check the Subscribe page directly if cost matters to you.