The first week of August:
.Take pictures of your garden to plan for next year’s vegetable and flower gardens because now is an ideal time.
.Order your spring flowering bulbs now.
.Check your garden plants, shrubs, flowers, and trees for diseases and insects.
.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.
.Remember to make arrangements with a friend or family members to water your house plants while you’re away on vacation.
.Harvest vine-ripened vegetables. Share extras with non-gardening friends and neighbors.
.Harvest and hang herbs before they go into bloom. Tie in little bunches and hang in a ventilated warm space to cure. After thoroughly drying, put in sealed jars to use in the winter.
Mid-August:
.Apply a second treatment of lawn insecticide for grub control or use milky spore dust, a bacteria that will attack over forty species of white grubs; this can be applied any time.
.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 dried. Cantaloupes are ready to eat when stems slip or separate easily from the fruit.
.Feed roses for the last time.
.Continue to compost grass clippings, pruned pieces, and weeds that have not gone to seed.
.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.
.Continue to hang harvested herbs.
.Check vegetable and other plants for evidence of insects and disease.
Late August:
.Refrigerate grapes after harvesting because they perish easily.
.Inspect trunks and branches of dogwoods and other trees for injured bark or fine dust pushed from burrows in trunk by borers.
.Fertilize fall vegetable garden plants.
.Plant new lawns or reseed bare spots in old lawns. This can be done until September 30th in Delaware.If it’s dry, be sure to water newly seeded lawns every day.
.Harvest ripened vegetables and share extras with non-gardening friends and neighbors.
.Harvest and hang small bunches of herbs before they flower.Tie in little bunches and hang in a ventilated warm space to cure.
