The Vegetable Plot - August

 Harvest and grow 

There should be plenty to harvest this month. Second early potatoes will be ideal for salads and maincrop potatoes will be ready when the leaves turn yellow. You can store potatoes in hessian sacks which allow ventilation but exclude light. Lift and dry onions, shallots and garlic when the foliage yellows and flops over. Harvest French and runner beans to stop them running to seed.

Regularly harvest courgettes before they get too big. Spring sown carrots and beetroot will be ready but you can leave them in the ground until you need them. Sowing cauliflower, endive, cress, red cabbage, spinach, turnips and radishes will add to your vegetable platters while Chinese cabbage and Chinese Kale make great autumn salads and stir-fries. Fast-growing lettuces such as Little Gem and ‘Tom Thumb’ will keep your salads coming.

• Early potatoes can be dug up and dried for next year’s seeding
• Gather herbs
• Clear outspent cucumbers
• Apply tomato food to peppers, cucumber and aubergine plants when fruit start to form
• Earth up maincrop celery
• Feed tomato plants with tomato food and remove lower leaves
• Water copiously broccoli, marrows and tomatoes
• Limit the fruits on squash plants to three when they are established