August Gardening Tips

Feeding and watering is the order of the day (or month) Keep up with all the little jobs that will keep your garden looking lovely and help your plants thrive next year. There should be lots to harvest this month if you have planted veggies. Plus enjoy the sensory side of your garden with all the different colours, fragrances and varieties of leaves.

Top Gardening Tips for August

• Continue to ‘deadhead’ faded flowers regularly. This means taking off the flowers that have bloomed already which encourages your plants to produce more flowers. Roses, Hemerocallis and Dahlias will all carry on flowering longer if deadheaded. If you have sweet peas, keep cutting for the house – not only will they look and smell amazing, the more you cut, the more flowers they will produce!
• If you haven’t already your Wisteria trees a summer pruning, cutting back all the long whippy side-shoots to about 20cm (8in) from the main branches.
• Now is the time to collect seed from your favourite plants ready for planting next year. Pop them in an envelope until your ready and keep dry.
• Continue to feed tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and beans fortnightly with a high potash feed to promote fruit development, feed such as Tomorite is good for this.
• Harvest garlic and onions when the leaves turn yellow and start to flop over.
• Veggies such as courgettes and beans benefit by regularly picking, this encourages the plants to produce more fruit.
• Be water-wise – water in the evenings or early mornings to reduce water loss through evaporation. And don’t forget to keep bird baths and garden ponds topped up in warm weather.
• The combination of rain and warmer weather means weeds can quickly get out of control if not tackled early, so keep an eye on them
• Strawberry plants start sending out runners now – these are long shoots with a cluster of leaves at the end. Peg down the leaf clusters in soil or pots filled with compost and they will root and grow into new strawberry plants.
• Prune plum, cherry and peach trees now. Pruning them while they are in leaf reduces the risk of diseases like a silver leaf.
• Keep watering containers regularly, especially in hot weather, and feed flowering plants fortnightly with a liquid high-potash fertiliser like tomato feed.

A Garden Sensory Experience

The HTA’s ‘Gardening is good for you’ campaign is all about creating a sensory experience in the garden this August – whether it’s filling your garden with vibrant colours and stimulating foliage plants can excite the senses from colours, evocative scents, delicious flavours, tactile appeal or just their calming rustling and movement, we benefit in many ways from having plants in our lives.

In complete contrast plants can be used to make calming, private and secluded spaces. A tranquil garden that calms the senses is the perfect place to sit and relax, or just meditate and practice mindfulness … relieving stress and improving mental health and well-being.