Hi @Former-Member,
I love the idea of gardening thread! I started a similar thread in the LE Forums, which has recently been reactived by @Appleblossom and @Former-Member.
I can't say I'm much of a gardening myself. I'm more of a spectator, and person who enjoys being out in nature. But I hope Appleblossom or Tawney might be able to give you some tips for cooler climate.
I wish I could think of more people who garden around here on the Forums, so if anyone is out there and reading this, please jump in and contribute to this discussion! 
Haha @Determined, my idea of gardening involves someone else mowing our lawn when it starts to look like a jungle. 
I'm a keen gardener. It's neglected at the moment because I'm a bit on the overwhelmed side, but quite some time ago I decided I needed a "crisis resitant garden". We've had too many extreme situations following on one after another for a high care garden to be an option.
So "neglected" means that the big annual veggie area down the back has grown very little this year (mostly but not exclusively healthy weeds), but the perennial flowers, herbs, vegs and fruit that I've put in over the years still give us something, helped along by the self seeders. It does me good to be able to walk outside and pick something. The fact that it's rarely mown (well, whippersnipped) means that there's lots of insects, birds, lizards, frogs, and sometimes larger animals too. (The local black tailed wallabies like our yard.)
Currently... the white peaches have finished, the apple is one that has a heavy fruit year followed by a little-or-no fruit year, and it's in one of it's "off" years. There's baby blood oranges on the tree, baby feijoas for the first time, a few medlars, silverbeet is dropping seeds that will grow lots of baby plants soon, ditto poppies, looseleaf lettuce and nigella. There's some parsley plants and a lot more will come up over winter, there's lots of assorted herbs- mint varieties, rosemary, lemon thyme, lemon verbena, lemon balm, garlic chives, sage, savoury, fennel and others. The Jerusalem Artichokes are higher than the side fence and flowering- I can dig them up for soups and casseroles over winter. The tomatoes haven't done very well because they went in too late, there will be a small potato crop, maybe a kilo or three. Sweet potato also went in too late, ditto eggplant.
Sedums are flowering, so is agastache and chinese lantern. Lavender's finished and needs pruning, some of the buddleias are flowering and a few Belladonna lillies. The chrysanthemum might have grown enough to flower this year, and leaves of the nerines and grape hyacinths are coming up.
So basically, all the "successful" harvests at the moment are coming from the neglect-tolerant part of the garden. I'm hoping to spend some time over autumn relaying the big veggie patch. I'll plant a few autumn/winter vegs in it, but mostly I want to get it ready for next spring.
Here's one of our visiting wallabies- female with a full pouch. 🙂
