THE MODERN MINT BLOG
Gardening Jobs August
What are the gardening jobs to do in August?
1) Make hay while the sun shines (you can always do this by scything…)
2) Prune wisteria.
3) Deadhead your dahlias.
4) Be water-wise (don’t water your lawn, use harvested rainwater instead of tap water. If you haven’t harvested any rainwater, try somewhere like Harrod Horticultural for ideas.)
5) Start thinking about ordering bulbs for planting in Autumn – we are doing a garden design in Upminster, Essex at the moment and will be adding lots of daffodils – cannot wait!
6) Use up your courgettes – put them in chocolate cake, barbeque them, slice them thinly, add creme fraiche and then grate lemon zest over the top – they are a brilliant vegetable. We are growing Striato d’Napoli this year and it looks great…
7) Harvest your blackcurrants (what do you mean you haven’t planted any blackcurrants?) and make cassis or add to porridge. Yum!
8) Trim your yew and beech hedging.
9) It’s hot. So enjoy the last days of summer and don’t work too hard…
For more in depth knowledge on what to do now, try these books…
RHS Gardening Through The Year
Four-season Harvest: Organic Vegetables from Your Home Garden All Year Long
EBTS Boxwood Growers Forum
Through the European Boxwood and Topiary Society I worked with Chris Poole and Sue Mesher, members of the EBTS board, and we set up a Boxwood Growers Forum. This was to discuss how to make sure this wonderful topiary plant stays in the public conscioussness – we know many growers, suppliers and distributors have stopped selling it as the cost of replacing boxwood that has blight, or is nibbled by the boxwood caterpillar, makes it unviable to offer to clients and gardeners. But Boxwood is a phoenix plant, and there are ways to deal with the problems associated with Buxus. …
Modern Topiarist @ Garden Masterclass Poland
My video on Modern Topiary for Garden Masterclass has been translated into Polish, for the keen gardeners (and happy pruners!) of Garedn Masterclass in Poland. Tickets for the first showing and q and a were available here. But it will become available on the Garden Masterclass Poland website at some point in the near future – so if you are a keen clipper and want to know more, but speak Polish and not English, then I suggest you visit the website and get watching. (Of course, if you don’t speak English, you may not be able to read this…. hmmm… …
Topiary Hotline
The European Boxwood & Topiary Society are to run a Topiary Hotline for keen gardeners and people who love to clip. Date is tomorrow, April 16th 2024, and you can get a ticket for the Zoom meeting here – Topiary Hotline. Run by Chris Poole and myself, we set this up as an antidote to the huge amount of questions we have to answer about topiary throughout the summer. The plus is that their is an excitement around topiary and pruning. The problem is we need to help people in a better way… … so we will be giving people …