Your easy guide to growing dinner in your own backyard

Actually they were pretty boring onions - I'd grown used to homegrown ones, with flavour, sweetness and crunch. But those onions were the beginning of the slippery slope into buying my veg, rather than using what was in the garden. Onions today, out of season cherries tomorrow...

Fruit and veg have suddenly slipped into the luxury category again. Even if prices drop, with the world's growing supply and climate uncertainty, there'll be times they skyrocket again.

So time to grow rocket - and a few other fruit and veg that used to be household standards, the fruit and veg in season your family ate every day, with little work, time or hassle. Keep chooks to eat the weeds, scraps and surplus and with a little extra layer pellet feeding, the hens will give you free eggs and free fertiliser too.

Rhubarb. Grow a winter-bearing variety and you'll have it all year round for rhubarb and yogurt, porridge with rhubarb or rhubarb tart. Feed rhubarb well, and it will feed you also.

Asparagus. Perennial, grows like a weed. Just don't accidentally weed it out when it dies down in winter. Again, feed well. Grow your asparagus from seeds - the "crowns" are expensive. Two years' good growth from the new seedling varieties will give you fat spears for three months each spring.

Silver beet. Twelve plants, given lots of tucker, and you will have endless spinach quiche, spinach soup, in "green cheese" sauce or just to sneak into the topping on a pizza

Any lettuce: choose ones that don't heart, either frilly or "rabbit ear" varieties, to pick leaf by leaf.

Spring onions: sauté the tops and leave the bottoms to report.

Tomatoes: try the fruit fly-resistant cherry tomato types that bear early, and keep bearing into winter. Grow lots for tomato kasundi and chutney to cheer up winter stews.

Cucumber: go for never-fail apple cucumbers rather than the more tropical long Lebanese varieties - unless you are an experienced gardener.

Spuds: Plant now. Lots. Do you really need a lawn? Or would you prefer a year's supply of potatoes for the family. Ditto carrots

Rocket, parsley and many other herbs to spruce up stews and salads and make the kitchen smell like paradise.

Pumpkins: go for fast maturing bush varieties and a long keeper like Queensland Blue. Once again, do you really need that lawn? It would look far better covered in pumpkins, or cold-climate watermelons. Possibly parliament might set an example and have the green grass roof exchanged for one covered in traditional Aussie Ironbark pumpkin, the kind you need an axe to defeat and that keeps forever, not to mention tastes fabulous when baked. Give the crop to a food bank then plant the area out to leeks and broccoli come autumn.

As for fruits: mulberries, any nut trees (self-pollinating varieties), early and late apples to keep them fruit fly proof, at least one apricot, the kind that blooms late and won't be cut by frost, plums (stewed plums were the standby of the Depression days, but you can cheer them up with a dash of port or wine dregs from last weekend), hardy plumcots, oranges, cold-climate mandarins (sadly usually the seedy kind), Eureka lemon trees (where traditionally blokes met to fertilise them with leftover afternoon libations after Sunday lunch each week), feijoa (if you are feijoa fan), a Nelly Kelly passionfruit, hardy winter fruiting pears, maybe a crisp persimmon for winter eating too, and fences covered in kiwi fruit vines for enough vitamin C to ward off colds...

In fact just about every fruit or veg will grow and feed you, as long as you feed and water it and keep out slugs, snails, boisterous puppies, or wombats in search of carrots.

The secret? Plant something every day; pull out a few weeds each day too; mulch and feed once a week, and water it in. Water mid-week too, if you have time.

It is easy. Truly. Our ancestors, too, had little spare time or energy left for their gardens after a long day's toil, unless they were the kind who had 12 under gardeners. The backyard fruit and veg that is the basis of the Aussie diet is based on very hardy crops indeed.

Bung them in, and they won't let you down.