As I mentioned last year,  winter gardening is my deficiency; the horticultural underbelly of my existence, filled with slow-growing cabbage and brussel sprouts in my backyard.

The backyard garden in south-eastern Australia in June grows at a glacial pace, as the cold and lack of sunlight conspire to deliver less interesting vegetables - unless you so happen to be a fan of brassicas, the genus of plants in the mustard family: sprouts, cabbage and kale. I’m actually a big fan of eating them but they’re just a little boring to grow.

This year however, something has clearly gone awry in my vegie patch.

I'm still harvesting eggplants and chilis by the basketload (pictured above)  and while you can generally stretch out a longer season from chillis, the eggplants should have stopped flowering about two months ago. After bumper crops that began in summer, I’m beginning to run out of ideas of what on earth to do with them. The vague plan is to roast and freeze what is not eaten immediately. Tomatoes that I pulled out months ago have self-seeded and are starting to take off despite the cold. Beetroot, that I planned to harvest in September looks like it’s going to be ready to pull from the earth within the next month or so.

In short, my garden has gone 'aseasonal'. The kneejerk reaction would be to place the blame on climate change. Maybe the tipping point that allows me to germinate summer seeds in winter has been reached?

The Bureau of Meteorology’s climate outlook predicts that Melbourne has around a 70 per cent chance of a warmer than average winter this year. Over the first two weeks of June, the mean maximum temperature is up on historical average by 0.8 degrees, the mean minimum temperature is up by 1.4 degrees. If I was a better planner, I should've taken the BOM’s predictions into account before I planted anything at all – but I doubt that such a small and incremental change could be making the disproportionate difference in my garden.

A more optimistic theory behind the 'aseasonality' of the crops in my backyard is that I’m getting better at gardening. The soil is beginning to take on a rich black tone that you see forked out of plots on gardening shows. After a year, the heavy clay that sits beneath the garden is beginning to loosen up. A full year’s worth of vegetable scraps and raked leaves have been composted and poured into it, as has as much manure as I can get my hands on. The surrounding plants are healthier, screening the garden from extremes in the weather.