Seedy secrets: August gardening tips

And so the year tips over into August. The tree foliage looks dustier and the blackspot is getting a grip on the old roses. But it’s also harvest-time – wonderful!

Not only is there fruit and veg to pick, but what about seed-harvesting too? This is just the time to get started, as well as sowing some unusual goodies for winter and turning the compost heap among other jobs………

Collecting seeds

Lots of plants will be going to seed now, and it feels almost criminal not to be collecting this marvellous free harvest. I’m thinking of things like foxgloves (Digitalis), love-in-a-mist (Nigella), sunflowers (Helianthus), Cosmos, Allium, honesty (Lunaria), Aquilegia, Verbena bonariensis (as in our feature pic this week), poppies (Papaver), Primula.etc. Seeds from ‘species’ plants will reliably result in plants very similar to the parent plant but seed from cultivars (when a species plant has been given a specific name) will be much more variable. You’ve enjoyed the lovely flowers and now they are giving something more – the means to make more gorgeous plants!

You need a dry, windless day for this job, and the seed-pods need to be ripe, which generally means they have changed from green to brown. The trick is to collect them when the seeds have ripened but before the plant has dispersed them. I hold a paper bag or an envelope underneath the seed-pod and give it a tap. If a few seeds fall out, they are ready to harvest. Don’t use plastic bags for seeds because you want any remaining moisture to dry up and in plastic, seeds can easily rot.  I often just snip off the entire seedhead and let it drop into the bag. 

VERY IMPORTANT – label the bags or envelopes promptly, or you will quickly get muddled as to which plant you took which seed from

Once you’ve collected a few bags-full, leave them in a dry airy place for a week or two to dry out completely, and then on a comfy seat at a table, you can sift out the seeds from the pods, bits of stem and chaff. If you leave this on, it can be another way that the seed is affected by damp or mould. Primula seed should be sown fresh as should the seed of umbellifers and hellebores, but otherwise I usually then transfer my seeds to neat little white envelopes, correctly labelled, and store them in a wooden box or seed tin in a dry, cool, dark place until springtime. We have put together a great little video about this whole process – click on the link below to see exactly how to save this wonderful free bounty from your garden.

We have some wonderful seed tins in our shop – please do take a look using the link at the bottom. If you have a lot of seeds, consider donating them to a seed-sharing service like the one run by the Cottage Garden Society.

Late summer sowing

Obviously the main season for seed-sowing of veg was late winter and spring, and if you heeded the advice to keep sowing things like peas and lettuces, you should be harvesting happily well into September. BUT with a bit of canny planning, you could be picking things to eat right into October, or even well into the New Year!

I’m talking about rocket, quick-maturing varieties of lettuce, mizuna, corn-salad, perpetual spinach and oriental leaves of all kinds. There’s even such a thing as a winter lettuce with the glorious name of ‘Black-seeded Simpson’! I’ve never grown him myself, though. You might also be tempted by more unusual salad leaves like winter purslane or salad burnet.

You basically use the same technique for sowing any of these seeds:

1. Use multi-purpose peat-free compost to fill a seed-tray, pot or almost any container in fact, as long as it has got drainage holes in the bottom.
2. Scatter the seeds over the surface and cover them with a thin layer of compost. Sow quite a few because these late-sown seeds tend not to make much new growth once you’ve started harvesting the leaves.
3. Label the tray (and a sowing-date is a good idea, especially if you’re sowing several batches in succession).
4. Water the tray gently using a rose on the can.
5. Leave the tray in the greenhouse or on a windowsill for about a fortnight until they germinate, keeping the compost damp but not soaking.
6. Prick the seedlings out into modules when they are large enough to be handled.
7. Gradually get them used to being outdoors over about a week – outside during the day, inside at night. Then they are all ready to be planted into beds, pots, window boxes etc. to enjoy through the autumn and winter.

Go on, I double-dare you to have a go at this and polish up your vegetable-growing credentials even more!

Your ideas book

Those of you who have been following our blog for a while, will know that I’m very enthusiastic about the reflective side of gardening. I love the names of plants, I love the planning and siting of them, learning what they will and won’t do, finding out more all the time. I’m sure that many, if not most, of you feel the same as I do, seeing this passion for horticulture as (cliche-alert!) a journey rather than an arrival.

The middle of summer is a great time to go out into the garden with a notebook and a pen and write down some of these thoughts while the evidence is slap-bang in front of you.

I really like the quotation that goes:  

‘The best way to have a good idea, is to get lots of ideas and throw the bad ones away’.

My many old garden notebooks are full of TERRIBLE ideas – putting pots in the wrong places, planting shrubs where they are going to overwhelm neighbouring roses in a nanosecond, etc.  etc., but some of them have worked so well they have formed an integral part of my garden – plant combos that work, having more no-plant areas to create more atmosphere, and so on. 

Gardening shorts

• If you grow sweetcorn, harvest the cobs when the tassels are brown, and your fingernail pushed into a kernel releases a milky sap.

• Pick woody herbs like sage or lavender and hang bunches of stems up in an airy, cool place to dry and store them.

• Keep pinching out the side shoots of cordon tomatoes and snip the leading shoot out when the plant has made 6 trusses of fruit if you’re growing them in the greenhouse. Make that 4 trusses if you’re growing them outside. This will give the fruit a better chance to ripen before the cooler weather of autumn sets in.

• Turn your compost heap a few times during the summer. This helps to aerate the heap and speeds up decomposition. Water it if you need to. Don’t turn it in the winter as that can make it lose heat which slows the rotting process down. You don’t want to disturb any hibernating mammals either.

💚 The costs of keeping our site working and safe are going up. We want to go on sharing everything for free without adverts, but if you enjoy our weekly posts, the price of a cup of coffee would be extremely helpful in paying the bills! Thank you 💚

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Here is the link to our video explaining how to collect seeds from your garden

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At about a metre high, these statuesque plants last well into autumn, and make wonderful cut flowers. How to grow them? Read on….

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Once you’ve collected some seeds, store them securely in a waterproof tin. We’ve got three options in our shop so do have a look…

One more thing: We had a great response to our piece last week about some of favourite gardens to visit, and we were delighted when several kind people wrote in with suggestions of their own. We thought you might like to see these extra suggestions added to our list, which I promise you will reward some further investigation:

Sissinghurst Castle; Ninfa in Italy; Great Dixter,;The Manor, Hemingford Grey; Iford Manor;The Mill Garden, Warwick; Alnwick Castle Gardens; Cambo Gardens; Hospitalfield; Branklyn Garden; Inverewe; Stone Cottage, Kidderminster; Helmsley Walled Garden; the Manor House, Stevington, nr. Bedford.

NB If you’re not already a subscriber and you’d like a bit more gardening chitchat from the3growbags, please type your email address here and we’ll send you a new post every Saturday morning.

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