AUGUST GARDENING CALENDER

For the first week of August:

v Order your spring-flowering bulbs.

v Check your garden plants, shrubs, flowers and trees for diseases and insect pests.

v Begin planning and planting your fall vegetables, such as lettuce, radishes, kale, spinach, carrots, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower and peas.

v Harvest and hang herbs before they go into bloom. Tie in little bunches and hang in a ventilated warm space to cure. After thoroughly dried, put in sealed jars to use in the winter.

Mid-August:

v Apply a second treatment of lawn insecticide for grub control or use milky spore dust, a bacteria that will attack more than 40 species of white grubs. Apply anytime.

v Prepare lawn or lawn areas that are going to be seeded.

v 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.

v Feed roses for the last time.

v 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.

v Harvest and hang herbs before they go into bloom.

Late August:

v Grapes that are ripening now perish easily, so keep refrigerated after harvesting.

v Inspect trunks and branches of dogwoods and other trees for injured bark or fine dust pushed from burrows in trunk by borers.

v Fertilize fall vegetable garden plants.

v Harvest and hang herbs before they go into bloom.

v 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 every day.