AUGUST GARDENING

First Week in August:
 Now is the ideal time to take pictures and plan for next year’s vegetable and flower gardens.
 Order your spring flowering bulbs.
 Check your garden plants, shrubs, flowers and trees for diseases and insect pests.
 Begin planning and planting your fall vegetables, such as lettuce, radishes, kale, spinach, carrots, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower and peas.
 Pinch back to remove dead heads from annuals.
Mid-August:
 Collect materials for dried flower arrangements, including weeds, flowers, marsh grasses and foliage.
 Prepare lawn or lawn areas that are going to be seeded.
 Harvest ripened vegetables. Sweet corn is ready when ears feel full and firm and the silks have turned brown and dry; cantaloupes are ready to eat when stems slip or separate easily from the fruit.
 Feed roses for the last time.
 Check azaleas, if they are beginning to look pale green to yellow. This is called chloritic. Check soil pH. These acid-loving plants may need to be fed.
Late August:
 Grapes that are ripening now perish easily, so keep refrigerated after harvesting.
 Inspect trunks and branches of dogwoods and other trees for injured bark or fine dust pushed from burrows in trunk by borers.
 Plant new lawns or reseed bare spots in old lawns. This can be done until Sept. 30 in Delaware. If it’s dry, be sure to water newly seeded lawns daily.