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Thursday 3 August 2017

The Vegetable Plot - August

We’re rooting for you

If you’re wondering what to do with that spare bit of ground or border and haven’t grown vegetables before why not give it a go? There’s plenty you can easily sow this month and a good place to start is with fast growing lettuces such as ‘Little Gem’ and ‘Tom Thumb’. Move on to cauliflower, red cabbage, spinach and turnips and you’ll soon be producing crops for the table.

Chinese cabbage and Chinese Kale are great for autumn salads and stir fries. Land cress, radishes and endive are easy to grow and delicious to eat. It’s not too late to grow carrots but watch out for carrot fly when thinning the plants. Radichio can be sown outside now for autumn salads and winter hardy spring onions such as ‘White Lisbon’ can be direct sown for cropping next spring.


If you have already grown herbs such as thyme now is a good time to collect them for drying. For those of us already growing vegetable there are some more jobs to be done at leisure in August:

  • Clear out spent cucumbers
  • Dig up early potatoes and dry for next year’s seeding
  • Prune summer-fruiting raspberries and train young canes in their place
  • Sow onion seed in a sheltered place
  • Harvest and ripen garlic
  • Stop runner beans
  • Water broccoli, tomatoes, ridge cucumber and marrows in the hot weather
  • Harvest shallots


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