Back-to-school, everyone! Gardening tips for late August

A big change in the weather at last for many of us – phew! 

While we are watching our plants lap up their first drops of rain in weeks, jealous of those marvellously verdant gardens further north, there are some end-of-summer tasks to tackle such as pruning lavender, sowing hardy annuals and noting some changes needed for next year…..

Loving the lavender

I love the way that the bees and other pollinators keep coming back to lavender flowers even when almost every flower is brown and faded.  It is clearly such a wonderful nectar source that they just keep returning for more.  They are definitely slowing up their activities now though and as the end of August approaches, it’s time to cut the flowered stems off and also cut back about one third of this summer’s new growth.

Lavender is one of those plants that has a great aversity to sprouting from old wood, so when you are doing this pruning, make sure that you don’t cut right to the hard woody brown base.  Try to leave a few little green leaves and tiny shoots on each stem from which the new ones will spring next year.

Hardy annuals

My annuals have had a pretty miserable time of it this summer.  These shallow-rooted plants were always going to suffer in dry weather, and mine have had to cope with too much ‘grey’ water, irregularly given, to thrive.  But every gardener lives in hope and by sowing some hardy annuals now, the resulting plants should be stronger  and flower earlier – perhaps they may be more able to withstand lack of rain next summer?

You would normally sow annuals (plants that germinate, flower and die in one season) in early spring.  But if they are HARDY annuals (can withstand frost),  it’s possible to sow them now in pots in an unheated greenhouse, or in clean raked soil outside. Good candidates for sowing now would be Ammi, Orlaya, Echium vulgare, Love-in-a-mist (Nigella), Cerinthe, Malope and Calendula.  Here’s a thought: you could sow a few more in spring as well and keep the brightness and freshness of an annual display going all the way from May to October!

One more thing – It seems a bit mean, but if you’re growing these early-sown annuals in the protection of a greenhouse and they develop some flower buds over the winter, you should snip them off, so that the plants concentrate their minds growing strong roots instead.

Changes and improvements

We all want to make our gardens as good as they possibly can be, don’t we? But outdoor spaces will always be subject to the vagaries of weather, environment and soil.  Ideas that worked before will not necessarily work forever – oh boy, do we know about that now! – and the reflective gardener is someone who can accept that there are ALWAYS things to try or to change.  Come on, be honest, would you want it any other way?

Now is the perfect moment to look at your patch with a properly critical eye and make a note of things that DID look good, things that DIDN’T, and any improvements you could make for next year.

Lots of my notes involve how plants responded to the drought of course – established roses have had a fab time of it, as have the sedums, vines and grasses.  The Ligularias on the other hand looked at the weather forecast and gave up immediately.

Perhaps I could install a couple more water butts (could you?)? Which parts of the garden could have done with much more mulch to seal in all the winter/spring rain before June? With what could I replace the small magnolia that is clearly not going to make it, etc, etc.

Did you have something that grew too big in your garden? Or didn’t grow at all? Note all these thoughts down – later on you’ll be really glad that you did, And even if only half the improvements are achieved for next year, you’ll still have made progress on achieving the garden you’ve always wanted.

Gardening shorts

• Do you have a clay soil? As I’m sure you know, it can be gloriously fertile but very tricky to manage at times. While being extremely heavy and waterlogged in winter, clay soils can develop huge cracks in dry weather during the summer.  How about turning a negative into a positive, and pouring some grit or fine gravel into the cracks?  This treatment will massively improve the drainage of clay by increasing its porosity. If you don’t have either of these to hand, at least fill the cracks with compost.  This will help the composition of your difficult soil when it comes to future plantings.

• Have you ever layered a plant? It’s an easy risk-free way of multiplying certain plants with bendy low-growing stems. Forsythia, Azaleas, Daphne, clematis, wisteria (mine did it all by itself.  Several times!).  I even made a lot of my beloved catmint bed by layering stems. The idea is that stems are pegged or weighted down in the soil around the parent plant whilst still attached to it. When these stems start to show new growth (ie they have made new roots at the point where they were pegged down) they can be detached from the parent plant and moved to their own growing space.  

*Finish your summer pruning of trained apples and pears – shorten any lateral stems more than 8” (20cm ) long to two or three leaves above the basal cluster.

• Cut back all the new side shoots on wisteria to five or six buds from their base, for a good display of flowers next year.

• We are already starting to be bombarded with spring bulb catalogues – take time to peruse them, pick your favourites and order them while they are all still available.

---

A clematis perfectly suited to grow through a small tree and one that can handle a bit of drought. It’s certainly done enough to be one of Louise’s Great Plants this Month

---

Looking ahead to the autumn, we created a list of our favourite September and October plants. I’m sure many of yours are included. You can check them out here

---

Daring to think we might get back to some proper gardening in the coming weeks we’ve got just the tool to make this thought more enticing. This beautifully crafted, stainless steel weeding and planting trowel from Burgon &Ball will make those autumn tasks a pleasure.

---

 💚 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 💚

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.

First Name

Email address:

Leave this field empty if you're human: