A while ago Trudi wrote a piece about eating seasonably and all the benefits of it.  When I was in England, I tried my best to eat seasonably, as being a lazy girl it was an easy way to be green with fairly minimal effort and you get the food at its best. Everyone’s a winner.

This is something I have tried to continue whilst in Australia.  However it’s been slightly more challenging this side of the world for a few different reasons.  One of those being that the seasons are reversed here, meaning I have to switch June around in my brain from Summer to Winter, and all the foods I associate with winter which to me is pumpkins, root vegetables, yummy soups and Christmas dinner (Veggie style).  

Although it doesn’t feel like winter to me, the temperature hasn’t dipped below 10c and has even been up 20c which has been a fairly average temperature, and what as a sun deprived Brit I consider basically summer or spring at least.  Now I’m not a farmer, but I have been assuming that these foods generally grow in colder temperatures.  Leaving me not sure as to what foods are currently in season and what aren’t.

After doing a bit of research, and talking to some of the locals, I discovered that Australia doesn’t have seasons in the way I would normally think of them due to the sheer size of the country. There are two seasonal patterns that split the country in half.  The way it was explained to me is that if you draw a line across the country from Sydney, south of the line they have the classic European seasons Summer/Autumn/Winter/Spring and from Sydney north they have Wet/Dry seasons…. Confused yet?

Luckily I stumbled across the Seasonable Food Guide Australia website, which breaks down the country by city or region, making it so much easier to know what I should be adding to my shopping basket and what I should be leaving out for a while, until they come back into season.  I have been surprised by some of the fruits and vegetables are currently in season and the amount.

Currently the only fruits in season for Sydney are Lemons, Mandarins and Oranges, meaning I hopefully won’t be getting a cold this winter, with all the vitamin C in those fruits!

I think so far this has possibly been one of my biggest challenges when it comes to living a more sustainable green life whilst travelling, as the warmer temperatures in the ‘colder’ parts of Australia have forced me to rethink the foods I associated with each season.  I just assumed they would be the same here just in reverse.  However I have learnt that living in a country with two different climates has some serious up sides as it means more foods are in season at any point in time.

Once I understood the different climates zones and discovered I could use this to my advantage not only by eating seasonably, but locally as well. One of the great things about Sydney is that there’s a lot of farmers markets in places you wouldn’t expect, meaning I can reap the rewards of locally grown food with minimal effort.