August Gardening: Tips and What to Plant

Posted on 6 August 2025

Happy August! We hope everyone is having a great summer so far – we also hope you like our new website! Please let us know your favourite parts, or anything that should be changed: we appreciate any feedback!

What have we got planned this month? Well, apart from integrating and getting used to this new website, we are also prepping for the Gardeners’ World Autumn Fair at the end of the month. We are back at Audley End, Essex for a weekend of meeting avid gardeners and customers, trying new food, and seeing the beautiful borders designed by local landscapers. We are sponsoring the show and supplying our products for use on the show gardens! We’re so excited to see them!

Some big news, we are now accredited members of BALI, a trade association of high quality and trustworthy garden designers, landscapers, suppliers and training providers.

Top Jobs:

Its Harvest time! I know we have lots of fruit and veg to harvest this month (we have lettuce and tomatoes coming out of our ears!!). If you cant eat all of your crops at once, consider freezing or making preserves like jam – yum!
August is one of the hottest months, so proper watering is essential. Try and use grey recycled water or stored rainwater wherever possible. Focus your watering on containers and new plants.
Feed your growing plants with mulch – choose a mulch with lots of nutrients to feed your growing plants (our Field No.25 Maximulch is a perfect summer mulch because of this!)
A big job for August is pruning and deadheading, to prolong blooms. Alternatively, leave seedheads on plants like teasels and lavender, to provide food for birds and small animals

General Garden Maintenance:

Take advantage of the dry weather by painting fences, sheds and other wooden features with a preserve.
Clean off moss and algae from patios and hard surfaces. Doing this job now will prevent them becoming slippery during winter

Lawns:

Maintenance of established lawns:

Mow lawns lightly and frequently; raise the cutting height on your mower to help grass cope better in hot, dry weather.
Resist temptation to water established lawns, even in dry spells. Your lawn should cope well in drought and if it dies back, don’t worry, it will soon recover once the rain returns.
Apply Field No.4 Organic Fine Grade Lawn Dressing onto lawns, especially those on thin or poor soil. No.4 is high in potash and phosphate, so will strengthen the grass roots for winter, rather than encouraging just lush top growth that could suffer in the cold, and thus weaken the grass.

Maintenance of new lawns:

Water areas that were newly sown or turfed in spring to keep them going through their first summer; water every few days unless it rains.
Cut new lawns every week or so, as required. In hot weather, keep blades high or stop mowing for a while, and progressively lower the blade height until they’re back to normal level.

Plan ahead: Prepare the ground if you want to make a new lawn in autumn; weed and dig over the soil. Then leave it for a few weeks to allow weeds to reemerge, apply weedkiller or hoe them off to ensure the site is thoroughly cleared.

A customer's lawn using our No.5 to level and topdress, Coventry.

A customer’s lawn levelled and top-dressed using Field No.5.

Flowers:

Jobs:

Deadhead flowering plants regularly, pinching off faded blooms with your finger and thumb. Deadhead perennials like dahlias, roses and penstemon to prolong the display colour.
For hanging baskets, regular deadheading and watering will help them last through until autumn. Also add tomato feed fortnightly.
On a dry day, collect seed pods from plants you are planning to reseed, for instance, sweet peas, calendula, nigella and hardy geraniums. Also collect seed pods from those flowers that you don’t want to reseed themselves.

To Sow:

Hardy annuals. Towards the end of August, sow hardy annuals directly into borders. They will overwinter and flower next spring and summer.
- California poppies. Sow these where you want them to flower – in shallow drills in well-prepared soil, or on the surface of our Field No.23 Professional Potting Blend compost in pots.
- Calendula/pot marigold. These can be sown in August and September for flowers the following spring. Sow them where they are to flower; Use Field No.23 to create a seed bed, or in pots.
- Cornflowers. Sow these now for May flowers. Use Field No.23 to create a seed bed or when sowing in pots.

To Plant out:

Biennials. Start planting early-flowering biennials, like honesty or wallflowers, that were sown undercover in May and June. Field No.23 is perfect for this!

Fruit and Veg:

Jobs:

Harvest sweetcorn, French and runner beans, potatoes, carrots, beetroot, courgettes and more – the list goes on forever! When you harvest onions and shallots, leave them to dry in a sunny spot before storing. Also, when harvesting fresh herbs, you can freeze them in ice cubes for winter use, or hang them up to dry to store in jars.
Ensure any fruit crops aren’t pinched by birds; cover them with netting but ensure this netting stands well clear of the fruit.
Cut back herbs to encourage a new flush of leaves that you can harvest before the frost. Any not used when fresh can be dried or frozen for later use.

To Sow:

Use our Field No.23 Professional Potting Blend compost to create seed beds and to fill pots/containers. You can also use our No.2 Growbags to sow your salads and herbs.

Lettuce. These can be overwintered in greenhouses and beneath cloches, for pickings from April through to June.
Spinach. Sow direct in well-prepared soil. Cover with a low cloche when temperatures start to fall. The plants will enter dormancy over the winter, ready to provide a fresh crop of leaves in early spring.
Turnips. These are best sown direct, then thinned in late August or early September. If sown in modules, they can be thinned to two or three roots in each, for planting out in late august.
Herbs. Sow basil, marjoram, chives, dull and coriander in pots outdoors. Move them indoors in late autumn.

To Plant out:

Lift and plant well-rooted strawberry runners into new beds.
Winter cabbages that were grown from seed in previous months should be planted out now.
Plant out leeks.

Trees and Shrubs:

Jobs:

Summer prune both free-standing and trained apple and pear trees. This will allow sunlight to ripen the fruit and ensure fruiting in future years.
Prune wisteria and climbing shrubs, e.g., pyracantha after flowering.
Give hedges a final trim over now. They will only grow a little before cold weather stops growth.