Paraic’s Tips For Your Garden In August

August brings us the last month of summer, but it’s not the last month for colour. This month is an ideal time to plant for late summer and autumn colour in your garden. It’s also an ideal time to sow many plants including vegetables, salads and herbs for winter use. You can even think ahead to (dare we say it?) Christmas… If you want new potatoes this Christmas, now is an ideal time to plant them. Here, Paraic shares his advice for what you should do in your garden in August.

Lawn Care

• To prepare your lawn for Autumn, it is time to treat and feed.  Apply a dressing of Zero Lawn Moss to remove the moss. We then recommend applying Zero Lawn Feed. This slow-release fertiliser will feed and green over the Winter months.  Ensuring a healthy lawn next Spring. It’s safe around pets and children -better yet – there’s no need to rake out the moss!  For any pesky weeds, use dicophar. 
• August is one of the best months to sow a new lawn or re-seed bare patches in your existing lawn. Green Velvet lawn seed is a perfect, hard-wearing lawn seed. It will give you a hard-wearing lawn that is easy to maintain, yet ideal for children and pets to play on. If you have any bare patches in your lawn you can also use Green Velvet to fill these in. 

Sow and Grow

• Sow vegetables, herbs and flowering plants from seed. August is ideal for sowing a wide selection of edible and flowering plants from seed. Simply sow the seeds in a pot of compost and cover with cling film. Then just watch them grow and replant them once ready!
• Plant blueberries now in large pots or directly out into your garden soil. Blueberry plants produce their fruit in August, you may even be lucky enough to purchase plants with some ripening blueberries attached. Blueberries love lime free soil so when planting mix some Growise compost and a handful of Ericaceous Plant Food into the soil. Finally, remember to water the soil well. 
• Japanese onion sets should be planted over the next couple of weeks. They will reward you with a picking of young, fresh, green shoots in early spring and full sized onions for April and May.
• Why not plant potatoes this Autumn? If you plant them this month you will have new potatoes by Christmas. Simply pot the tubers into a large plastic pot or a potato bag. 

Garden Care

• August is the ideal time to prepare for autumn. Clean out your bird feeders and wash them in a little detergent.  Then add some new wild bird feeds to prepare for the busy wild bird season in September.
• Kill Mare’s Tail with Neudorff weedkiller, which is specially formulated for the pesky weed. Weedfree 360 is an excellent product for all other weeds. Apply in dry weather and watch the weeds die away quickly.

Garden Colour

Did you know you can get plants for free? Yes, August is a time for propagation!

• Choose some of your favourite garden shrubs and cut pencil length slips off the plant.
• Dip the base of the slip into rooting powder and place the slip into growise compost in a medium sized pot.
• You can take up to twenty plant cuttings, placing them side by side in the pot.
• Cover the slips and pot with a plastic bag and leave in a bright sheltered location for four weeks.
• Once the slips have rooted, plant them in individual pots to grow over the autumn.
• Geraniums, Fuchsia, Lavender, Roses, Buddleias and Hydrangeas are all ideal plants for propagation. 

An outstanding flowering plant for August and September is the Hydrangea. Hydrangeas are a large flower with blousy blooms that continue to flower from August to early winter. One of Paraic’s all time favourites is the Hydrangea Purple Dance. It produces large round mop head blooms in a deep purple colour, the colour intensifies as the weeks pass moving from a rich blue to purple and nearly to black. Hydrangea Purple Dance is ideal to plant in large pots or directly out into your garden soil.

• Sow your very own Scented Persian Carpet now. It’s so easy to grow, yet so colourful when in bloom. It’s also a fantastic nectar-rich plant for bees.
• Why not add some evergreen climbers to your garden this month? Climbers with both foliage and flowers look best. Try an Evergreen Virginia Creeper, Hydrangea or Honeysuckle. Remember to add a good compost when planting and feed with Horkans Blooming Magic. 
• It’s the ideal time to sow bee friendly wildflowers from our wildflower collections. Simply rake the soil to remove stones and weeds. make sure the top layer is loose before sprinkling seeds and sow a wildflower patch in your garden. This will attract bumble bees, butterflies and honey bees next spring and summer. Remember to add some spring and summer flowering bulbs to this area next month.

Interested in learning more about gardening? Just follow along with our “Learn to Garden” blog here. 

Do you have questions about your garden? If so, just contact your local store where one of our helpful and knowledgeable staff will be happy to help and answer any questions you may have.