August in the garden: take cuttings, mow the lawn & sow your seeds

August is a busy time for cutting back those summer blooms that are past their best and giving the garden a good tidy up after frenetic growth during June and July. It’s also a time to harvest your salads and herbs and to enjoy all the good things that have sprung from your hard work. Here are some tips for August in the garden.

Focus on watering

Most plants will enjoy some watering at this time of year, but it is important to remember some customers are needier than others. For instance, if you grow Michaelmas daisies, they will be in flower soon, so water them well now, to ensure they flower into late autumn. Another watering tip: plants in containers always need more attention than those in beds and borders.

Binweed attack

This is when bindweed can seem to be strangling your garden at will, and at the same time cheekily producing its white flowers. Remember that breaking off the stems is not a good short-term solution – it just encourages more vigorous growth. Dig it up and expose the white roots that need to be pulled up. You can give yourself an incentive by remembering that in a few weeks the bindweed will have died down and you won’t be able to find it.

Mow long grass

If you have an area of long grass that housed flowering bulbs, followed by summer flowers, these will be dying off now. Once they have died off, mow the grass as soon as possible. This will ensure that the site has time to recover this season, and that the cut grass will stay dry and be easy to remove, rather than sodden, which it is likely to be if you cut in a few weeks’ time.

Trim Yew hedges

If you have hedges of yew or other evergreens, this is the time of year for the main trim or cut. Earlier is better, particularly if you need to give the yew quite a hard cut to retain the hedge’s shape, because it gives the cut shoots plenty of time to ‘harden off’ before winter and prevents them being damaged by heavy early frost. In any event, you’ll get better growth next year if you cut in August, rather than later on.

Cut Anthemis down

If you grow anthemis for their daisy-like flowers, cut them to the ground now, and give them a good soaking. It should encourage them to produce a second flush of new foliage and flowers in autumn.

Prune Rambler Roses

Rambling roses don’t need annual pruning in the way that shrub roses do, but they often need to be kept in check, or to have their shape improved. This is the time of year to do it, cutting selected old stems right at the base of the plant, and trimming others to give the desired effect. When in doubt, always cut off a bit more rather than less, as it will stimulate stronger growth.

Plant out strawberries

Plant out new strawberry plants into soil that has been really well enriched with old compost or manure.

Take flowerheads off herbs

You grow your herbs for foliage, so don’t let them waste energy producing seeds once they have flowered. Take off faded flower heads, and deadhead your plants, to ensure good shape and strong production into the autumn.

Harvest herbs for winter

Most herbs keep brilliantly if picked fresh and then frozen, so pick now, while there are plenty of fresh leaves, and put them in a freezer bag for winter use.

Freshen up containers

It’s easy to give your containers a cosmetic lift for the season by taking out plants that have really died back and replacing them with varieties that flower in late summer, such as nicotiana, Japanese anemones or salvias, and otherwise trimming off flowerheads and dead foliage.

Water your compost heap

Making good compost takes effort, and you don’t want yours to go to waste because your compost heap dries out in the summer. If you give it a good soaking in dry spells, you can ensure that the process of decomposition will continue.

Sow Pansy seed

Pansies grow really easily from seed, and you should sow them now for flowers next spring. Just remember that you need to keep the seedlings under cover until the spring.

Cloche Salads

It’s nice to be able to go on picking salad crops as long as possible, and an easy way to do this into the autumn is to acquire some cloches, and cover a piece of prepared ground where you can then plant out some lettuce seedlings. You could even just about raise some quick-growing varieties from seed sown into the soil under the cloche.

Store potatoes

If you’ve got a decent crop of potatoes, you’ll be lifting more than you can eat now, so you need to have a good storage place to keep them for the winter. It must be dry and dark, and it helps if the potatoes are as clean as possible when they go in.

Pick beans

Now you’ve got the crops of runner and French beans you’ve worked hard for, don’t worry about picking them all at once. The more you pick, the more you encourage them to continue growing.

Lift onions

If you grow onions, (or indeed shallots) they are probably ripe, or will be in the next week or 10 days. They need to be lifted out of the ground and left to dry for a couple of weeks before you move them into indoor storage.

Take Fuchsia cuttings

Fuchsias are really easy to grow from cuttings, and you can take cuttings any time from now.

Tree suckers

This is the time of year that suckers that have sprouted from the base of trees (especially plums and cherries) become prominent. Suckers can be troublesome because their vigorous growth redirects energy (especially from newly planted young trees), so cut them off as low as you can.

Focus on watering

Dead-head hard

August is the month when most of your summer flowering plants have finished flowering and are looking pretty mournful. You’ll be surprised what an improvement it makes if you deadhead them, (especially the perennials) and in many cases you’ll stimulate a welcome second flush of flowers in a few weeks’ time.