Overview

For an overview of the full year go to my guide to gardening month my month

Jobs: Pinch out the tops of climbing beans. Cut out last years growth of summer fruiting raspberries, while it's easy to distinguish old and new wood. Continue taking strawberry runners. Lift onions and plant (or prepare for) your next succession, in our case that's field beans (in next year's brassica bed) and salad greens for late autumn.

Although in summer and spring timings don’t really matter, they become critical for veg that will be eaten in autumn and winter. Just a few weeks late and your plant’s won’t mature in time, so you might need to experiment with these dates for your micro-climate. Occasionally you will sow too early, in which case it’s easy to sow a few spares a week or two later, just in case!

Early August is key for module sowing spring onions to eat in autumn, late August to mature in late winter/early spring. Be sure to germinate these somewhere away from summer heat.
We also do a last sowing of Kale at the beginning of August, destined for either the polytunnel or one of our low tunnels. It grows slowly in Autumn, but by late winter it’s taking over from our outdoor plants and it lasts into May, when the outdoor plants have gone to seed (we eat the flowers though)
If you like to grow over-wintered onions (Japanese) sow them in early August and plant out in late September or October. Since we want these as early as possible we put some of ours in a low tunnel, which we remove some time in March, letting the onions fend for themselves. The tunnel goes over early French beans, which need it a lot more!
If you want some extra variety in your winter salad mixes sow claytonia, mustards, pak choi and salad rocket. We plant claytonia and salad rocket outside, the others do better with protection by October. Recently we’ve discovered that Claytonia does extremely well under cover too!
Early August is the time to re-start module sowing true spinach, so that it’s ready to replace the New Zealand spinach by the first frost. Spinach does fine sown in Autumn too, but will often not be ready for harvest until March
If you have some way to protect it, also module sow a batch of winter lettuces in early August. We will protect ours with low tunnels and cold-frames towards the end of September or early October depending on the weather. I like Roxy, Freckles, Navara and the best of all: Grenoble Red.
Late August is the last time to module sow corn salad (lambs lettuce), if you want it to mature in January, which is when we really need it! It’s one of the few salad leaves that survives outside, so it’s great for filling up patches of bare soil!
We also restart sowing radish in August, to mature in the cooler weather of autumn. We keep sowing it until mid October.
Finally we sometimes sow a batch of carrots in containers, which will stay outside until October and then mature over-winter in the polytunnel. We are switching over to growing winter carrots in the ground though.

Weekly Newsletter entries

The gardening week (August - Week 1, 2023)

The gardening week (August - Week 2, 2023)

The gardening week (August - Week 3, 2023)

The gardening week (August - Week 4, 2023)

Weekly diary photo entries

These links take you to my weekly photo diary:

This is what we harvested this month

https://youtu.be/yWrQn32jlck

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