Jobs for August

Keep sowing salad crops.

A sowing every three or four weeks at this stage will see you into the early winter. You can thank me then.

I like to do a late sowing of beetroot at around this time.

There is still time for the roots to develop, and the leaves make a delicious – and colourful – addition to autumn and winter salads.

This is also a great time to sow onion seed.

It took me a while to find an onion that would do well in heavy clay soil, but now I have the answer: Allium cepa ‘White Lisbon’. I like to sow quite thickly, so that I can add the thinnings to my salads.

There is still time to get summer and winter radishes

into the ground too. They are quick growing and an excellent choice for shadier areas of the garden.

Getting tomatoes to ripen can sometimes feel like a race against time.

Maximise the amount of sunlight that reaches the fruit – and reduce the risk of blight, which can be spread by soil splashing up on to the plants when you water – by stripping the lower leaves from your plants and pinching out the diagonal shoots that often appear between the main stem and the branches. Once my plants are around 1.5m tall I like to pinch out the tops too, to encourage them to put their energy into fruiting.

Now is a good time to give your perennial herbs

a good cut back and clean up so that they have the time to recover before the cold months. Take out any old and damaged wood, cut back to where you can see new growth and remove any weeds. Then water well with a liquid feed such as seaweed.