The garden in August

In August the garden slows down and settles down. The mad scramble to sow and to plant things out which rushed me panting through May and June, no day long enough, is gone. Grass still grows but no longer in front of your eyes. Beans and peas are established and romp away, safe by virtue of their height from the ravages of slugs and snails which wiped out smaller plants only weeks ago. Crops are beginning to be ready. The strawberries, raspberries and gooseberries are over and the apples not yet ripe, but the vegetable garden is producing daily for the kitchen.

Vegetable gardening is a great use of August. For flowers I am a spring and early summer gardener. From the first snowdrop and winter aconite through cyclamen, hellebores, daffodils, primroses, tulips, white foxgloves, irises, paeonies, poppies and roses, I am entranced from February to June. But year after year the battered school exercise books which are the closest I get to garden diaries show the entries after July becoming sparse and scrappy: “Dahlias eaten; garden dull; lilies good – plant more”. I think it is in part a legacy from when the children were younger and school holidays, going to stay with parents in Devon in August and later going camping in Cornwall and France. There was no point in planting for August because I was never there and back from holiday the focus was on getting back to school and work in September, no time for gardening other than planting yet more bulbs for another glorious spring.

But the kitchen garden really starts to deliver for you in August. The sugar snap peas and the French beans keep on and on cropping as fast as you can pick. (Note to self: French beans were not dwarf and so the supports are too short. Great variety, grow again next year but needs proper wigwams.) The courgettes are producing far too much as usual, a race to get them off the plant before they morph from green delight into monster marrows. There are red onions swelling and beetroot ready in the ground and the tomatoes in the greenhouse (far too many again, there will be days of chutney making in a few weeks) are beginning to blush faintly red. The globe artichokes I am growing from seed are planted out in a permanent bed, not quite big enough yet to be out of snail danger entirely so needing watching, but the silver serrated leaves lovely in themselves.

There is still weeding to be done, particularly the evil bindweed which longs to take back this garden to the wild and twines and strangles in every bed when you turn your back and the brambles which grow through fruit bushes and grab the unwary as they pass or pick.
It is time to sow more rocket and radishes and more lettuce; to sow rainbow chard as much for the beauty of its coloured stems which will stand through the winter as for the taste which palls for us after the first few weeks of inventive cooking. It is so easy to forget this succession sowing and the mark of a good gardener, which I am not yet but still wish to be, to get it right.

All the new herbs have taken. The lovage is settling in, planning for its gradual expansion from tiny plant to towering beauty. The pineapple sage, ludicrously sweet smelling when the leaves are rubbed between the fingers, is doing well. The fennel is not so sure, it feathery foliage drooping slightly, but it often takes things a while to decide whether they can cope with our stony soil and I think it will be ok. The tarragon is fine and the non-culinary plants which I have grown from seed, Bergamot and Echinacea, are surviving in their pots, despite many snail inroads. Time to plant them out and let them take their chance.

Despite what I have said, there are some real stars still in the flower garden, particularly a Crocosmia Lucifer which carries its sprays of brilliant red like a huge Versailles fountain, and the sweetpeas, planted in hope after reading something Milla wrote and nourished with bags of well rotted horse manure from my friend who raised my chickens. I thought they would never make it in the early weeks when they sulked and sat dully, refusing to grow, and then one day they were off and now they are higher than the raspberry supports and flowering so that the house has jugs of sweetpeas in every room, their faint fragrance catching you unawares as you pass through, like a movement out of the corner of your eye. They are to be enjoyed now for they will soon be gone but by then apples will be ripe and the tomatoes will have taken over the world and the butternut squash will sitting on the kitchen windowsill. It will be chutney time and the house will be full of the smell of vinegar and brown sugar. I would hate to live in a climate without seasons.