It’s the end of a beautiful summer in the USA, and gardeners across the continent are
wondering what to plant this month. If you’ve had a wonderful season overflowing with
organically grown food – it’s not over yet! There’s a lot you can do in August, including starting on the preparations for your fall vegetable garden. And if you’re just beginning your organic farming adventure, you’ve come to the right place. We have a roundup of plants that will thrive if you sow them this month, with many more posts on how to plant and tend a garden coming up soon.
Six leafy green salad ingredients.
Here are some vitality-boosting, mouth-watering greens you can sow this month:
Arugula
Basil
Cilantro
Mustard greens
Winter lettuce
Spinach
Some succulent root veg.
Root vegetables are so rewarding to grow and make for hearty comfort food once the days
start to give off that fall chill. You can plant these in August:
Radishes
Turnips
Carrots
Beets
Tasty transplants.
These seedlings will still grow if you can get hold of some in plant pots and transfer them to
your garden beds.
Cauliflower
Broccoli
Cabbage
Brussels sprouts
Please the bees.
A bright, fragrant bed or border of flowers brings joy to the heart – and also feeds the bees.
Flowers have the potential to confuse harmful pests or distract them away from your veg, too. You can plant these at the end of summer:
Winter-flowering pansies
California poppies
Violas
Poppies
Cornflowers
Calendulas
Pansies
Prepare for strawberries.
August is the perfect month for residents of the Northern Hemisphere to start their strawberry beds. Transplant strawberry plants from garden pots, or harvest your own runners, and pick a sunny spot that hasn’t seen a strawberry plant in at least three years (any strawberry diseases will have died out by this time).
Why don’t you make this the month to start including your kids in your gardening endeavors? We find kids love gardening so much more when they have their very own kids' gardening toolset and garden journal to fill out.
Learning from nature is deeply beneficial for children. Dig into our post on how to
inspire your kids to love gardening alongside you.
Let’s pat ourselves on the backs, folks (humbly, if we can manage it). And while we’re about it, let’s send each other, the whole organic farming community, a virtual pat too. By investing our time in sustainable gardening, we’re reducing our carbon footprint and doing our bit to lessen the harmful chemicals that are being let loose into our air and soil. In fact, we’re giving back to the earth by naturally enriching the environment, and by showing how worthwhile and rewarding it is to respect nature.
Written by Rifke
About the Author
Rifke Hill was raised on the sort of farm your grandparents told tales about – milking cows, gathering eggs, hoeing the soil, and building fires to heat water. She now spends part of her time copywriting online as a freelancer. The rest of it is spent nurturing and teaching her four energetic children, growing vegetables, baking bread, reading voraciously, having coffee with the neighbors, and enjoying the sunny slopes of the smallholding where she lives, in the Garden Route, South Africa.
