Complete These Tasks This Month to Get Your Garden Ready for Fall
If you are in that part of the world where the hellish temperature of +23 degrees is now, I will see you. It may be hard to believe that autumn is just around the corner, but I promise that someday soon the leaves will fall due to the change of seasons (and not because of a lack of desire to participate in global warming).
While we’re enjoying the last bits of summer, there are a few gardening tasks that should be on your radar.
Take the last consecutive landing this week
When you’re harvesting lettuce, radishes, bush beans, broccoli and cauliflower in your garden, you have the opportunity to perhaps get another short seasonal sequence if we’re talking starters, not seeds (most of the time). Take a few more lettuce leaves, add radish and carrot seeds; you might be able to get another crop of bush beans, and beets and kohlrabi are good options. And, if you toss in a few pea seeds, you might be able to sneak into other snow and grab a peak sequence on your trellises.
Otherwise, it’s time to start autumn . Eat all kinds of broccoli and cauliflower, as varied as possible. Look out for heavier winter cabbages like savoy, hearty red and purple kale. Buy spinach, chard, and kale from the garden, and if your celery has wilted, add more celery.
Be sure to leave room for the garlic, potatoes, and onions, as you’ll need them as soon as the heat subsides.
Top those tomatoes
We’ve come to that part of the summer when you have to make hard choices. You can keep growing new tomatoes at the risk that they may not have time to ripen and your plant will waste energy on those children that it could use to ripen existing tomatoes, or you can invest in your existing tomatoes. It was a trick question because the answer is the last one.
To get your tomatoes to focus on the kids they have and not the kids they want, you prune the tomato plant, but prune any vines that aren’t fruiting or are sick, and prune the vines above the existing tomatoes. It’s cruel, I know, but it’s education.
Change your color for fall
All the annual color you added a few months ago is probably in bloom right now—petunias, pansies, and other spot colors. Dahlias, zinnias, blanket flowers and helichrysums are probably still on and will continue into early fall, but you should schedule your later fall color now.
The answer is mothers and asters. Moms have a bad reputation as matrons, but that’s because they come into the nursery as sad furry creatures. You want to find chrysanthemums, the beautiful cousins of dahlias, with their vibrant color and giant spiky petals. They are perennials so they will return if you can plant a few of them and to be honest the smaller mums will also spread and fill with color so both are worth it.
Native asters like the Douglas aster, which has small flowers, will thrive and fill your garden with fall color that pollinators love. There are also Chinese asters, which, like chrysanthemums, will make you even more dazzling in late autumn.
Pansies are a good annual for this time of year, as long as you plant them after the last bit of heat dome has passed and don’t overlook the ornamental kale for its color. It may seem tame now, but as the leaves begin to fall and snow falls, you’ll appreciate the more subtle bursts of color.
Continue in the same spirit
If you haven’t trimmed all your berry shoots , cut down your strawberries, and started mulching, time is up. August is the last chance to prune fruit trees (except cherry – leave that for colder weather).
Obviously, we are still trying to keep our heads above water harvesting, but now you can really enjoy the most colorful harvests every day. Try to take plenty of photos so you can come back next year to see when everything is ripe and also to cheer you up in the dead of winter.