Gardening in August!

It's August - last month of winter, to state the obvious, but I'm excited as there is heaps of fun stuff to do in August. If you are in coastal SA (i.e. not inland) this is what we can be doing in August. Melbournites you can join us too!

Things to sow into punnets in August*:

• Late Onions (eg. creamgold and ever green spring onions
• Capsicums (we're planting 7 colour Heirloom)
• Leeks (some fancy French Heirloom Jaune du Poitou!)
• Tomato (this year we are trying Tommy Toe Red & Gross Lisse)
• Celery 
• Kale
• Asparagus (check out FAT BASTARD!)

We use a seedling tray in a little green house (less than $8 from Bunnings) and put it out in the sun when it's out and keep them in the laundry when it's not.

Straight into the garden you can sow*:

• Lettuce Heirloom Mix (any time of the year!)
• Carrot Heirloom Mix (July to March in warm climate)
• Silverbeet, why not try the spectacular 5 colour mix which can be grown at any time of the year and adds a pop of colour!
• Spinach

General gardening

• A trick some people do is to cover their soil with black plastic or newspaper to warm it up.
• You can spread well rotted compost or manure if you haven't already.

Fruit trees

• If you are lucky enough to have fruit trees now is the time to protect them from leaf curl. You can do this by spraying copper or lime sulfate. For more info check out the experts here and here.

* I'm in a warm coastal area where we get 150-240 growing days per year. Your local nursery will help you with when you can plant based on your local climate conditions.

The beginning of our small orchard

I posted yesterday that we bought home the first of our tree babies, so I thought I better continue the story, and let you know what happened next.

We were still on a 'retail high' - you know that buzz you get when you buy something that you think is going to make your life better in some unrealistic, delusional way! So when we started discussing where we would put our new babies and making sure we had space for the mandarin that we will have to pick up later, we noticed that if we did a 'bit more' clearing we could actually get 7 trees in! We are planning to put a tree in the middle of every panel of the fence.

Unpacking our new dwarf babies!

The BIG moment!

Missy Moo doing a spot of rhythmic gymnastics in front of the royal gala (left) and peacharin (right) trees.

Horsing around with the rope from the tree packaging in front of one of the newly cleared sections.

Our Pinkabelle in the newly cleared space.

Perry's gave us an info sheet to help us with the care of our new dwarf babies. I was surprised that we only need to water them in when planting and then not water them until they start getting leaves. We also need to do some copper spray to prevent leaf curl, which we will do at the beginning of August.

We have three spaces for more space for trees, feel free to leave a comment about what you think we should get!