In August you can almost wind up with too much veg on your hands particularly
courgettes and tomatoes and runner beans. Keep on picking though for the crops going
into the autumn. Water takes priority now and make sure you give everything a
thorough soak once a week and then make sure you don't forget to keep planting
so you can enjoy crops into the winter and into next spring. The greenhouse
cucumbers have done really well this year and they've grown massive.
The secret with cucumbers though is to keep picking them regularly and also to feed
and water them every day as well whenever they feel dry. Don't worry if
you don't have a greenhouse though you can still grow cucumbers. Which?
Gardening trialed the outdoor ones which produced lovely lunchbox sized fruit and
they did fantastic in our trials. The sweet peppers and the chilies are really
starting to fruit well now. Now most of them start off a green colour, but you
might find your variety starts off cream or yellow or even purple, as they mature
and they sweeten up most of them will turn red. Now in terms of getting the
fruits to ripen the best thing to do is to use a tomato food. It contains lots of
potash and this will help the fruits ripen and taste sweeter. Add a cup every
time you water your plants and they should grow well. As summer progresses
the tomatoes are doing brilliantly well and have now got masses of fruit. Now it
seems funny but you don't want them to produce millions and millions. So the
best idea is once they produce four trusses that you take out the growing
point of the plant. This is to make sure in our UK climate that all of the fruit
will write them before the end of the summer and into autumn. Now with the
fruit it's starting to ripen up very nicely and the best thing to do is to
keep picking it regularly as this will help to encourage the green fruits to
ripen as well. Now with the fruit you can be a bit
overwhelmed with a glut at this time of year so why not freeze it. You can freeze
the whole fruits as they are and maybe pop them into soups and casseroles later
on or maybe you can be a bit creative, make something like a tomato sauce and
freeze it that way. Now in terms of getting your plants to carry on growing
really strongly don't forget you need to water them
regularly and also to try and feed them every feed because any slow-release
fertilizer by the end of August will be starting to run out. Now watering is
super-important for tomatoes and if they're not watered regularly what
you'll find is is the fruit begin to either split open because they're going
from a stage of not having enough to suddenly having too much which causes
them to rapidly expand and split. Or you get another common problem which is
blossom end rot where the bottom of the fruit turns black and then often rots
away before you can harvest it. so remember keep on watering your tomatoes.
During August I like to get ready for a bit of a January treat. What I do is I sow a
winter variety of carrot called Eskimo and that goes into the pots that
I've previously used to raise the early potatoes in the greenhouse. Now I check
through all that compost and make sure there's no little vine weevil grubs
inside and then I fluff it up and I add some fresh compost to the top and then I
simply sew the carrots over the surface and once you've sowed the seeds cover
them over with some compost just to keep them nice and moist. And then they grow
outside until it's ready to bring them into the greenhouse in about October
just to keep them out of the worst of the cold and then I should have some
lovely fresh carrots to harvest in January. Now one of the secrets of
growing really good crops of vegetables is to make sure they never run out of water.
No matter what the weather, whether it's a hot dry summer or a wet one
watering should be one of your key jobs. Now there are some vegetables that need
particular attention, but for most vegetables what they need is a really
thorough soak once a week. Now don't give them a little daily sprinkling as you'll
find to get the roots really damp and give them the water they need a thorough
soak is what's needed.
By August blight can often be a real problem in the allotment. It attacks
potatoes and tomatoes and you'll notice the first symptoms are brown patches on
the edges of the leaves. On the tomatoes as well it will also turn the fruits
brown. Now this year we've been lucky - fingers crossed - but the conditions that
really encourage blight are warm damp nights and that's when it often sets in.
Now unfortunately if it did hit your tomatoes, there's nothing you can do and
you just have to pick the crop use anything that you can and then it's gone.
Now with potatoes though there is something you can do. Cut the foliage right back
down to the ground as soon as you see those blight symptoms and get rid of the
foliage. Then wait two weeks and then dig up your crops. And you should be able to
use the potatoes that you've harvested though do keep an eye on them through the
winter in case any show signs of rotting. By August it's time to tidy up the
strawberry bed. Now if you need any new plants make sure that you pot up the
little baby runners and then they can be used to replace the bed. It's a good idea
to replace your bed about every three years because then you'll always have young
vigorous plants. Now for all the rest of the plants that you're not going to be
using for runners, you can just shear them off with a pair of hedging trimmers
and at the same, time scare out any weeds and also any of the straw you might have
put on to protect the fruit. Compost is one of the best things you can add to
your soil to really improve its structure. No matter what type of soil
you're on. Now to get compost you need to get composting, so whenever you harvest
anything or pick up any annual weeds make sure you're putting them onto the
compost heap. When Which? Gardening tested different
ways of making compost we found that we got the best results when we used a
50/50 mixture of green material and brown material like cut up newspaper or
pieces of old cardboard. The other thing that works really well if you're keen
for composting to happen quickly is to turn the heap about once a month. To do
that, it's a big job you're going to need to empty out the whole bin and then
refill it, but it really does pay off in terms of
much quicker composting. Now runner beans, tomatoes and courgettes are all crops
by August time you can have far too much of as they seem to crop so well.
Now it may seem a bit painful to do but the best idea is just to keep on picking them
even if you think you couldn't bear to see another runner bean if somebody
paid you to. The reason for that is that way you will carry on getting crops into
the autumn, when actually there will be fewer around and you'll probably
appreciate them again. Now the easiest way to freeze them is to make them into
something like ratatouille or some sort of soup or stew, who knows, otherwise just
try and give them away or you can put them on the compost heap if you can't do
anything else with them. Now in terms of helping to avoid gluts in the
future the real ideal is to think about how
many plants you really need. Runner beans in particular it's very tempting to do a
big 20-foot row of them but actually a small wigwam can often be just as much
as you need. Similarly courgettes, 2 plants will do most people. Then the other thing
is, if you're getting lots of quick growing crops like beetroot the thing
with what you need to do there is to only sow a next batch of seeds when
the previous seeds have germinated and the other thing is, is when especially
when you're beginning it's very tempting to sow that whole packet of seeds in one
go, but actually if you just sow say 10 plants at one time you'll find by having
a little and often you'll get a much more effective crop.
Now sweetcorn should be getting ready to pick in August , though in some areas it might not be
until September. In terms of knowing when it's ready, look out for the tassels
turning brown like this. There's sort of a whitish color earlier on. Another test
you can do is just to gently peel back the outside and then stab one of the
kernels. Now if the juice comes out and is milky they're ready and this is still
a little bit clearer so I'm going to leave it for a little bit longer yet.
Now you may have heard with sweetcorn that you need to pick it and eat it within
seconds of it coming off the plant otherwise all the sweetness is lost. But
actually when Which? Gardening tested the sweetness of sweetcorn over a
period of several days after picking we found that yeah it does
decrease but not as dramatically as you might think. So don't worry if you can't
harvest your sweetcorn and eat it all in the same afternoon. Now ideally the main
crop potato should really stay in the ground until September so they've got as
long as possible to bulk up and produce really good sized spuds.
However if you're having a damp season and a lot of slug damage is occurring
it's worth lifting them early as potatoes in particular are targeted by keel slugs
which live underground and then burrow into the potatoes leaving horrible
little tunnels and sometimes even the slug still inside. The other thing of
course that can hit at this time of year is blight. Any signs of that and you want to cut
back the foliage and lift the potatoes within two weeks. And also you might have
run out already of your second earlies and so you just want to get on with eating
the main crops. Now if you do lift them now leave the potatoes out in the
sunshine for a day or so and then pop them in paper bags and then you
can bring them home for storage. Brassicas such as this sprouting
broccoli can be planted now to give crops over the colder months and into
the sprin. Now the secret with any Brassica is to
plant it really firmly, so that if you tug the leaves the whole plant wouldn't
come out it would just be the leaf that would rip. Give them a real, thorough soak
and then at this time of year cover them over with a fine mesh such as Wanda
mesh to keep out the caterpillar pests that like to attack them and then
later in the year we'll move over to a wider mesh that will keep out those
hungry pigeons during the winter.