August and September in the Garden

August and September are a time of transition in the garden. At the start of August, the summer sun will still be warm and the fruit harvest should have moved on to loganberries, early blackberries and the first of the apples and pears. The vegetable garden should have matured nicely, with a large variety of crops to choose from - in some cases coming faster than you can harvest them. Yet by the end of September gardeners will be starting to prepare their plots for the coming frosts and clearing out the spent crops of summer. Another growing season will be nearing its end, and thoughts will start to turn to planning and preparing for the next season.

Harvesting crops

Harvesting crops will be a major feature of August, as will arranging for storage of some of the bounty to help provide food during the cold months to come. You should find that you're lifting the last of main crop potatoes. Dry the spuds on the soil surface for an hour or two after lifting and then store in a cool dark frost free place in paper or hessian sacks - you'll have spuds lasting well into spring hopefully. Main crop carrots are also ready for lifting - use what you can and then the rest can be stored indoors in boxes of damp sand. If you've got lots of carrots, you could even try using a clamp outside to store them. To make a clamp, clear some soil and pour out half an inch of sand to give good drainage at the base. Then lay some of the carrots on the sand in a ring with their root tips all pointing into the centre and their necks facing outwards. Put another ring of carrots on top of these, and continue to do this until you've run out of carrots and got a squat conical pile of carrots. Cover the cone of carrots with a 6-12" (15-30cm) layer of straw to insulate it against cold weather, and cover the whole pile with some sacking or soil to keep it in place. Clamps can also be used for some other root crops such as beetroot and make it much easier to access the crops in mid-winter than if the roots were left in the ground, especially in heavy soils that can freeze solid.

Tomato plants will be fruiting throughout this period, and it's important to make sure that you give the plants the right feed to keep them going. Avoid high nitrogen feeds once the fruiting has started and instead opt for feeds high in potassium (also called potash). You can buy commercial tomato feeds for this, but if you have a wood stove or fire and still have the ash from last winter's fires kicking around, use that as a top dressing on the pots or beds before watering.

Courgettes and marrows will also be growing madly now - if you want courgettes rather than marrows remember to check the plants every few days as the fruits can swell surprisingly rapidly. Courgettes can be frozen for winter use if blanched in water or sauteed in butter for a minute or two before freezing them. They can also be made in to ratatouille with some of your tomatoes and onions, which can then be frozen in batches ready to make quick and easy meals with the addition of a bit of pasta.

Talking of onions, many varieties will be maturing during August. The leaves will start to shrivel and dry up, which is a sign that the plants are nearly ready for lifting. Give them a week or two and then pick a dry day to get them out of the ground. Many can simply be lifted out, though sometimes you might need a fork just to ease them out. If the weather is dry and settled, leave them on the surface for the rest of the day to dry out. However if it is likely to rain gather them up and bring them inside to dry out on sacking or wire racks (last summer we ended up with an attic full of onions drying on some frames I made as the weather was so poor when we went to lift the crop!). Once dry, onions can be hung up for storage. Traditionally this is done by plaiting them together, but a modern option is to drop them into the legs of old pairs of tights or stockings - a great way to reuse old tights! Keep an eye on the stored onions - remove and destroy any ones showing signs of rot, and if you see green shoots appearing from the odd one here and there remove it and use it as soon as possible. Last year I also dehydrated some of these premature shooters which worked really well - I'm still using the dried onion flakes in June as I'm writing this!

Runner beans will be being picked during these months. Keeping on top of the beans is tricky, especially if you happen to go on holiday for a week or two! Invite friends and neighbours to help themselves whilst you're away as picking the beans encourages more flowering and more beans to come. If you do end up with large, tough beans because you didn't keep up with them, don't worry. Leave them on the plant until the pods start to go dry and brown and then pick them. Shell them quickly and dry the beans out before storing them in an airtight jar. These can be used either as seed for next year (assuming it isn't an F1 variety) or for cooking during the winter. Soak the dried beans for 6-12 hours before boiling and then using in pates, stews and bakes. I actually prefer to use the beans like this than eating the green beans during the summer, which means that I get the pleasure of stripping our allotment neighbours' old beans off at the end of the season as they don't want them!

In the herb beds, August and September are a great time to collect some leaves and seeds and dry them out, ready to store and use to flavour dishes over winter. In hot weather the drying out can be done outside, but once again if it is likely to be wet bring them indoors and dry them in an oven on a very low heat or in a purpose-made dehydrator. If you have a warm, dry room you can try hanging up sprigs of some herbs to dry out in the air - rosemary and sage work especially well like this.

Reusing the soil

As crops are finished and lifted during August and September, there is the question of what to do with the ground they have vacated. Leaving it bare is the lazy option and really it is a waste, likely to result in a fresh flush of last-minute annual weeds and leeched out nutrients. That space can still be productive in a number of different ways. First, you could slip in some quick-growing crops, such as lettuce, radishes and rocket, that will fly away in the warm summer sun and be ready to eat before the weather turns cold in October. The leafy crops can be slipped in more or less anywhere in your normal rotation, but really the radishes should go into the brassica section (along with the cabbages, brussel sprouts, kale, etc.), though many people do successfully ignore the rotation for these fast-growing space fillers.

Alternatively, some of the land can be used for hardy crops that will happily shrug off the winter chills and in some cases last well into next spring. In the north of the UK, spring cabbages are a popular choice as they can overwinter with little protection and now is the time to pop the plants into land manured for a previous crop (such as potatoes). If you have particularly heavy, damp ground you can help them survive the winter rains by planting them along the top of a ridge hoed up 6-9" high. Dib holes and drop the plants in up to the base of their first set of leaves, then give them a good soaking and heel them in firmly. Further south, or in the north with the benefit of protective cloches during the winter months, overwintering lettuces such as the butterhead variety Arctic King can be grown, and August and September is the time to get them sown.

If you have some cloches available for use later in the year, you can also try your hand at sowing some late carrots during August, which you'll be able to protect during the autumn frosts and then harvest during the winter. The warm summer soil should mean that the seeds germinate and grow away much faster than the batches sown earlier in the year did. Amsterdam Forcing is a suitable variety and being sown so late in the year they stand a good chance of avoiding carrot root fly, which will be dying off by the time the plants start to mature.

A more exotic crop is Japanese onions. These don't keep as well as main crop onions, but they fill in a gap in the onion supply between the last of the previous year's stored maincrop onions and the start of maincrop harvest. Japanese onion seed can be sown in drills in mid-August, or you can plant sets from September onwards.

Green manure

For areas that you really don't have a crop to fill, you can still sow some plants that will help improve your soil for next year. These are the green manures - plants that are grown specifically to be turned into the soil just as they flower in order to give the ground a boost of organic material, and potentially some extra nutrients. Popular green manures that can be sown during August and September include grazing rye, mustard, red clover, field beans, lupins (which look pretty as well!), phacelia and tares. In fact radishes can also be used as a green manure if you find that you grow too many - just use a sharp hoe to chop them into the soil. Bear in mind that some of the green manure crops will need to fit in with your rotation - lupins and field beans in the legumes section and radishes in the brassica section for example.

If you really can't sow even a green manure in your ground, at least try to cover the soil surface with a heavy mulch to protect the soil from weathering and keep down the weeds. Old cardboard boxes are great for this, as they'll rot down over winter and add to the humus in the soil. In the past we've covered such mulched beds with partly produced compost which holds the cardboard down, will add to the organic matter in the bed for next year and also frees up some space in the compost bins, which are often filling up before your eyes at this time of year. If you've got lots of grass clippings, they can sit on top of the cardboard boxes if needs be, and may help stop compost bins from going anaerobic and smelly due to overloading with too many clippings.

Mulches also help conserve water, which can be important during the late summer months if the weather turns out to be hot. Aim to water the plants that need it most to help keep your water supplies going for as long as possible - tomatoes, squashes and courgettes will appreciate the occasional soaking more than peas or root veggies will for example. If you have any weedy patches, giving them a good hoe during hot weather can put paid to them, especially if you resist the temptation to be tidy and leave the hoed off tops on the soil surface to dry up and form their own mulch (not to mention add organic matter to the soil eventually as they rot down).

Planning for next year

Finally, by late September you need to start thinking about your plans for next year. For example, if you want to plant some more top fruit trees, now is the time to start looking at catalogues to get orders in, and start to clear and prepare the ground that the bare rooted plants will go in when they are delivered in November or December. You'll also want to be looking at onion and garlic bulb orders ready for planting out in December.

By the end of September you'll already be thinking of sowing more crops ready for next season - broad beans such as Aquadulce Claudia can start to go in during the last week of the month and into October ready for harvesting next May and June.

And so as the current season starts its slow wane, the new season begins to call upon us. Summer will soon turn to autumn and the wheel of life in the garden turns once more. Enjoy!

Jim'll

Top photos (c) Steph Comley 2010

Compost photo (c) Salena Walker 2010