Gardeners Checklist: Here Is What to Do on the Week of August 7

By Ron Kujawski

• Preserve the surplus from your vegetable garden by canning, freezing or dehydrating the vegetables. If you have no experience in canning or freezing garden vegetables, seek out a friend who has such experience, or attend a class on food preservation. An excellent on-line source of information is the USDA’s National Center for Home Food Preservation: https://nchfp.uga.edu. For those who prefer to have a book in hand, I recommend: “Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving,” edited by Judi Kingry et al, and “Keeping the Harvest,” by Nancy Chioffi and Gretchen Mead (Storey Publishing).

• Sow seeds of sweet William, foxglove, Canterbury bells, hollyhock, black-eyed Susan, viola, and pansies directly into the flower garden, in a seed bed, or in flower pots. All of these flowers are biennials, that is, they have a two-year growing cycle. The plants will grow stems and leaves the rest of this year; produce flowers next year; and then die.

• Prune back annual flowers such as annual phlox, cosmos, flowering tobacco, impatiens, petunias, tall marigolds, zinnias, and any others that have gotten leggy. Leggy plants tend to produce fewer flowers. Prune back leggy annuals about halfway. Then give them a dose of fertilizer. In a few weeks they’ll be blooming again.

• Grab a head and give it a sharp twist…ouch, not mine, a cabbage head. Cabbage has grown well with the damp weather of spring and early summer. However, now that the heads are mature, frequent rain and hot weather can cause them to split. Split heads can lead to headaches … I mean decay. Giving a cabbage plant a sharp twist will break many of the water absorbing roots and prevent head splitting.

• Harvest onions and shallots as soon as the tops flop and turn yellow or brown. If soils are heavy and remain wet long after a rain, it would be wise to pull up these crops before the tops are completely brown to prevent the bulbs from rotting. Collect the harvested onions and shallots and keep them in a dry, well-ventilated area for a few weeks to cure. Without this curing period, they will not keep long in storage.

August is a great month for propagating ………. Uh, let me be more specific; it’s a great time for propagating plants. I often wonder why gardeners, including myself, don’t do more of this. It is fun and a cheap way of adding plants to our gardens. A good place to start is by taking cuttings of perennial herbs including lavender, lemon balm, rosemary, sage, and winter savory. Cut 3-6 inch-long shoot tips from these plants, strip off the lower leaves of each cutting, dip the cut ends in a rooting hormone, and then stick cuttings in a flower pot filled with moistened sand or perlite. Cover the cuttings with a clear plastic bag to keep the mix from drying. This same technique can be used to take cuttings from perennials in the flower garden. Dianthus and sedums are easy but experiment with rooting cuttings of other perennials. Geraniums, coleus, lantana, and impatiens are annuals that can be rooted and grown indoors through the winter in a well-lighted location. So, start propagating!

Ron Kujawski began gardening at an early age on his family's onion farm in upstate New York. Although now retired, he spent most of his career teaching at the UMass Extension Service. He serves on Berkshire Botanical Garden’s Horticulture Advisory Committee. His book, Week-by-Week Vegetable Gardener’s Handbook, is available here.