In your garden this month

Now’s the ideal time to make your garden holiday-proof if you are planning on taking a break

Top tips for keeping your garden in shape while you’re away, plus gold, silver and bronze plants to add an award-winning quality to your outdoor space

With warmer weather, longer sunny evenings and children off school, August is the month many of us choose to recharge the batteries, either at home or away, if we can. It’s also the month for lazy picnics in the garden with friends and family and if you have tended any homegrown produce, it’s the season to pick, eat and share gluts of the harvest.

By this stage of the year, you may have invested a great deal of time and effort into making your garden look beautiful, so it would be a shame to let it all perish from lack of watering in your absence. There are many automatic watering systems on the market but one of the easiest to use is Gardena’s AquaBloom as it’s solar-powered and doesn’t require a tap, so no need for any outdoor

Gardens and outdoor spaces are great places to keep children happy and entertained during their school holidays

electricity or water sources. All you need to provide is a large container filled with water, then set it up following the simple instructions.

Before you go away, it’s worth moving all of your pots and containers out of full sunlight and into a shadier area of the garden – but remember to always keep the solar panel for your automatic watering system in a sunny spot so it can stay charged.

Gardens and outdoor spaces are great places to keep children happy and entertained during their school holidays. The RSPB offers a wide range of creative and informative ideas and projects to help children reconnect with nature, including making a kebab to feed the birds, building a minibeast hotel, bird watching and doing wildlife surveys. For more information on each activity, visit rspb.org.uk.

Cut back woody herbs such as sage, thyme and rosemary to encourage fresh young growth; this will keep the plants in good shape and prevent them from getting leggy and tough.

Plant pear and apple trees in a sunny spot in your garden to create your own orchard, remembering to stake the trees to give them extra support

Enjoy the last of the blowsy blooms of any rhododendron shrubs you may have – deadhead the spent flowers to make the most of the bush

Check your vegetable and salad crops regularly as the produce will ripen very quickly at this time of year

Use the Gardena solar-powered irrigation AquaBloom set, RRP £99.99, to stay on top of your watering when away