Mid-late August Garden To-Do List
Question for you: How many of your 2024 New Year’s Resolutions have you kept?
With the start of a new school year, August offers a second chance at establishing healthy routines and habits. Are you ready for a fresh start for your garden? Mid-August is a great time to assess what’s working, what it’s time to let go of, and what you hope to accomplish in the garden before the end of the year. You’ve got an entire growing season to find veggie victory, so let’s go!
Watering: Keep monitoring the moisture level in your soil and adjust watering schedule as needed.
Harvest: Do you have a harvesting schedule? With produce coming in fast and furious these days, it might be a good idea. As many people are getting back into the school routine, perhaps it’s time to put “Harvest and Eat from the Garden” on the calendar for a couple of nights a week? If you’re looking for ways to cook your summer crops, check out the Growing Guides for each veggie. They list recipes near the bottom of each page.
For harvesting tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, beans, okra, eggplant, melons, summer squash and zucchini, mid-morning is the ideal time, once the dew has dried. Some people even swear that late afternoon harvest leads to sweeter tomatoes. For lettuce, greens, basil, and other herbs (plants we are eating the leaves of), harvesting earlier in the morning is better. The leaves are fully hydrated and more crisp at this time of day.
Onions are ready to harvest when the green tops have flopped over. If your onions aren’t bulbing up, you can still harvest them, just eat them right away as they will not store well.
Plant: With only about 65 days to our average first frost, it’s just about too late to plant any but the fastest producing summer veggies. Better to turn your attention to fall crops and find some shady spots in the garden to sow seeds of lettuce, arugula, Swiss chard, collards, kale, and carrots at the end of this month.
It’s tricky to get the timing of cool season crops. They don’t like the heat of August, but the larger brassicas like Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, and broccoli do need a longer time to grow before the days get too short. Experiment with planting seeds now, but also be ready to replace them with transplants from the nursery in a couple of weeks if they aren’t thriving. Or schedule a fall planting session with TKG.
Support: Continue to weave or tie tomatoes to their trellis (or prune, see below).
A simple bamboo stake next to the stem of peppers and eggplant will help support them as they get tall and loaded with fruit. If your plants are really big, make a note to consider planting them inside an obelisk next year.
Prune: This is the point in the season to get ruthless. If a summer plant isn’t performing well, it’s probably time to cut your losses and remove it entirely to make room for fall crops. The best way to do this is to just cut the stem at soil level and leave the roots underground to decompose. The exception would be if your plant had disease. If that’s the case, it’s best to pull out all the roots with the plant and dispose in the trash.
Keep pruning yellow or brown leaves off tomato plants. If they are getting really wild and overgrown, you can start to remove suckers and larger stems as well. Tomatoes (especially cherry varieties) in Middle Tennessee will probably keep growing for another couple of months, so it’s time to get creative with finding ways to keep them to a manageable size.
Feed: Continue to fertilize long-season plants like tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, and melons once a month. Use a fertilizer like TomatoTone or GardenTone which will encourage the plant to produce fruit rather than leaves.
If you haven’t yet this season, add layer of compost to your garden before you plant for fall.
Pests: Hornworms, Squash Vine Borers, Striped Cucumber Beetles, Squash Bugs, and Flea Beetles are still causing issues. Hand-picking and drowning in soapy water is always a good approach. You may see aphids on peppers or okra. Spray these off with a jet of water. Large brown Leaf-Hopper Bugs can spread disease to nightshades, pick them off — if you can catch them! See our Growing Guides for more info on these pests and options for treatment.
Diseases: You may be seeing fungal or bacterial disease hit your tomatoes. Just keep pruning off any damaged leaves and hope for the best. Some years, it’s not a question of “if,” but “when” our plants will be taken down.
Planning and Shopping: Some garden centers started stocking fall veggies this week! It’s kind of early, but it’s also kind of fun to see what might happen if you just put a few things in now. If you’ve got space, and money, and hope you don’t mind losing, you might hit the weather lottery just right. If not, re-plant in early September.
