The Dirt on August
By August, the garden can feel a little confused. Tomatoes and peppers are still shouting “summer,” the seed packets are starting to say “fall,” and next year’s strawberries are already quietly making plans of their own.
That makes August less about starting something entirely new and more about timing what comes next. This month is a good opportunity to shift part of your attention toward the fall garden, preserve some of summer’s abundance, and make a few strategic moves that will pay off months from now.
August Garden Checklist
Work backward to plan the fall garden.
Spring gardening tends to be driven by one question: “When is it warm enough to plant?” Fall gardening turns the question around: “How much growing time do I have left?” Here’s a useful formula: Start with the crop’s estimated days to maturity, allow roughly 10 additional days for slower growth during shortening fall days, decide how long you expect the crop to remain productive around frost, and then count backward to determine your planting date.
For example, for a broccoli transplant requiring 60 days to mature and using October 28 as the average first frost date, add 10 days for slower fall growth and assume the crop can continue toward harvest for a couple of weeks after frost. Counting back 70 days from
November 11 produces a target transplant date of about September 2.
That is an important reminder: just because we’re planning the fall garden in August doesn’t mean everything should go into the ground in August. The trick is to quit gardening by calendar month alone and start gardening by days to harvest plus local frost dates.
Choose fall transplants with some growing left to do.
If July got away from you before you started broccoli, cabbage, or other fall transplants, all is not lost. August is also a time to shop for them.
Look for young, actively growing plants, rather than oversized plants that have been sitting in their containers for weeks. Give priority to crops with the longest days to maturity. Faster crops can wait their turn.
Direct-seeded fall crops present a different challenge: germinating seeds in August soil. Unlike an established tomato plant with a substantial root system, newly planted seed has almost no margin for drying out. Keep the seedbed consistently moist during germination, especially during hot, rainless stretches. The goal is moist soil, not a daily reenactment of the Tennessee River.
Give your strawberries a meal for next spring.
Here is one August job that is very easy to overlook because strawberry season seems long gone. For gardeners growing strawberries in a matted-row system, UT recommends an August nitrogen side-dressing to encourage good fruit-bud development for next year’s crop.
Why now? June-bearing strawberries do much of their planning for next spring during late summer and fall. UT Extension explains that their flower buds are initiated as the days shorten and temperatures cool. Those buds eventually become the flowers—and then the strawberries—you harvest the following spring.
So, while the strawberry bed may look like it has retired for the year, it hasn’t. Follow Extension or soil-test recommendations for fertilizer rates rather than assuming more nitrogen means more berries. Overly vigorous cultivars can actually require caution with nitrogen.
August is one of those months when gardening proves that next year’s harvest often starts long before next year.
Preserve summer while you still have it.
At some point, even enthusiastic gardeners reach the stage of tomato season known as, “Please, take some.”
That makes August an excellent time to move part of the harvest from the garden to the pantry or freezer. Try canning, freezing or drying garden produce for later use.
Start with high-quality produce. Damaged or diseased vegetables have a shorter storage life, and freezing cannot improve produce that wasn’t good to begin with. Freezing is particularly effective at preserving nutrients, color and flavor, but it does not necessarily kill harmful microorganisms, so clean produce, equipment and food-handling practices still matter.
Canning deserves even more respect for the recipe. The correct method depends partly on a food’s acidity, so this is not the place to improvise Grandma’s recipe by adding “just a little of this.” Use a current, tested preservation recipe and the proper water-bath or pressure-canning method. UT Extension’s Canning Foods provides research-based instructions.
The goal is to preserve the harvest, not create a science experiment in a Mason jar.
Give your fall cover crop a job.
August is also planning time for something that may never appear on the dinner table: a fall cover crop.
Before ordering seed, decide what you want that crop to accomplish. Cover crops can protect bare soil from erosion, reduce nutrient loss, suppress some weeds, add organic matter, improve soil structure and—in the case of legumes—contribute nitrogen to the system. Some mixtures can provide several benefits at once. A grass and legume combination, for example, can provide substantial plant material along with nitrogen fixation and deeper rooting.
This is also a great time to think about the pollinators! Crimson clover and white clover can provide early-season nectar and pollen when allowed to flower. Ordering seed now gives you time to match the species to the site and decide which garden areas will become available first rather than buying whatever bag happens to remain on the shelf later.
August is the garden’s pivot point.
August isn’t quite fall, no matter what the stores displaying pumpkins would have us believe. But for gardeners, it is definitely the beginning of the transition.
This month’s most useful jobs aren’t simply more of the maintenance we’ve been doing all summer. They’re about using today’s garden to prepare for tomorrow’s: calculating planting dates, getting fall crops underway at the right time, feeding strawberries for next spring, preserving what summer produced, and deciding how bare soil will be protected once the season changes.
There’s still plenty of summer left. Just don’t let it distract you from what comes next.
Garden Checklist for August
Calculate fall planting dates by working backward from your local frost date and each crop’s days to maturity.
Purchase young, actively growing fall transplants if you didn’t start your own.
Prioritize longer-maturing fall crops first.
Direct-seed appropriate fall leafy crops according to your Tennessee region and keep the seedbed consistently moist through germination.
Side-dress matted-row strawberries with nitrogen according to Extension or soil-test recommendations.
Preserve high-quality garden produce by canning, freezing, or drying using tested food-preservation methods.
Decide what you want a fall cover crop to accomplish and order seed accordingly.
Consider crimson or white clover where early-season pollinator forage is part of the goal.
Research resources:
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