Welcome to the end of August.  Hard to believe we are nearing the end of the season feels like we were just starting to thumb our way through the seed catalog books that started arriving in our mailboxes in January oohing and awing over the new varieties that were available as vision of tomatoes cucumbers and zucchini filled our head.  If you were lucky your gardens exploded and started producing the long-awaited crops we’d been craving all winter.

Even though summer is coming to an end there is still much more to prepare for next year or to extend your growing season. Assess the growing season and how our garden did.   Was it unfortunately like most gardens where it was too wet for so long it took longer to start your garden and the heat and dry set in that it never took off like it should have. That’s what many of our participants faced this year but for others had a bountiful crop. Is it time to start thinking about how you will water your garden next year, if we should face drought conditions again.

Is it time to pull out spent plants or not?  This time of year our plants our starting to look less healthy and not producing as they once were.  If the plants are looking diseased you need to pull them up and dispose of them, not in your compost due to many diseases can carry into the soil and you don’t want to put all your effort into your garden next year not to start with healthy soil.  Of course some plants you can leave so the flowers can attract pollinators or produce seeds that you can save for next year.  Of course if you pull them up you can always start another round of gardening, time to start thinking about extending your garden and planting cool season crops and using covering.

 

No matter what you do we can always start dreaming of next years.