I am that strangest of things, a gardener who likes cold weather. Fall and winter are my favorite seasons by far, and there are few things I like more than bringing my sweaters down from the attic each October and pulling the first thick Shetland crewneck over my head. August is, therefore, not always a month I relish. We’ve had a brutally humid but nonetheless dry summer here in eastern Massachusetts, with many a large storm system missing my particular town by only a few miles, and my garden at home looks spindly and anemic. If you see me outdoors at all during the heat of the day in August, it will be in a baggy cotton shirt and a ridiculous straw hat, scampering from shade to shade with an occasional vampiric glare up at the sun.
The evenings are better. In the still-generous but shortening twilight, the Chimney Swifts twitter like swallows in a John Keats poem, dragonflies scour the air for insects, whizzing by in jewel-colored armor, and it’s calming to walk around the yard to anticipate the blooms still to come, many of which bear names of joy or celebration: New England Aster, Sweet Autumn clematis, Autumn Joy sedum.
While I’m there, I’ll grab handfuls of tomatoes for tomorrow’s lunch, pick off some basil just for the flavor of it, check for caterpillars on the kale plants, and mournfully stare at the patch where my winter squash used to be before the vine-borer holocaust. On wilder days, hurricanes that have broken up over the southern Atlantic coast send wild, spinning, fan-tailed storms hurling over us, breaking the drought as well as a good many branches from the dying Norway maple in our yard. In the mornings, the garden looks sodden and exhausted, shoots and broken flower stems dangling akimbo and dripping warm moisture.
Like its milder sister September, August is a season of heat and harvest, and it’s special to anyone who works in or around schools because it signals that fateful return to all the busy, merry chaos of school. It’s a moment when growth in the Northern Hemisphere has reached the peak, when green patches in the woods smell fetid and swarm with insect life, when mushrooms grow underfoot in abundance. It’s a time to consider how to profit ourselves from whatever rest we’ve had (if any), and to rearrange ourselves to walk back into the complex, normative, fruitful, maddening social world of the academic year.
There’s a particular moment that repeats itself in my life once a year, sometime around the last week of August. Though I always anticipate it, it always takes me unawares, often when I’m stepping out after dark to get the mail or to take a look at the Sturgeon Moon. In the quiet, breezy dark, a smell will hit me, very faint; a crispness. Something uneasy and strangely cool, like a patch of cold water in a summer pond. It’s the very first suggestion of fall. I smile and think of my heavy winter coats, of cider and firelight. Then I go inside.
In the meantime, there are tasks to be done in the garden. Here’s a short list you might find helpful.
1/ Cut Back Catmint
If you haven’t already done so, the first week of August is a good time to cut back all the spent blooms and branches of your catmint plants. At this point in the summer, they’ve likely grown into big, purple-brownish, ponderous and splaying globes in your borders, seldom visited by bees and not very pleasing to the eye. If you push back those rigid outer branches, you’ll see a spurt of fresh green growth struggling to get out. Take a good pair of sheers and cut the plant back by at least half, liberating that new growth and reducing the plant to a smaller, neater, rounder version of itself. It will reward you with a surge of freshness and flowers that will carry all the way through the frost. It will also make your hands smell like very grandmotherly tea.
2/ Fertilize Tomatoes
Your tomato plants are likely going strong, especially if the weather is sunny and hot. If so, don’t neglect to give them a feeding with liquid seaweed fertilizer or some other tomato feed once a week. Doing so will keep the fruit coming until the end of September or even into October if the weather stays warm, which it is doing more and more often. Three years ago I had the wild and mildly unsettling experience of harvesting cherry tomatoes on the first of November. It’s not something I would like to repeat, but I am likely to, and it was very delicious anyway. As the season goes on and the frost approaches, gradually reduce your watering of the plant to encourage it to send all its energy and sugars into the last ripening fruit.
3/ Harvest Peaches
If you grow peaches on your property, the squirrels have likely gotten wise to them, pinching quite a few, nibbling a bite or two, and then callously throwing them aside like psychopaths. It’s maddening, but there’s very little you can do about it that won’t make your yard look like an industrial slag heap, so your best bet is to pay close attention to the fruit, testing for ripeness starting right around the first part of the month. As soon as they’re ready, gather them in baskets and take them inside for a quick washing. Use them all as fast as you can to make jams, tarts, salads, salsas, sage-laced reductions for pork chops; anything to avoid putting them in the refrigerator. Peaches suffer greatly from being cooled and lose all their sunshine, so make it an occasion and give things a feast-day atmosphere. The very best way to eat them, of course, is standing in your yard directly under the tree, with the juices dribbling down your chin into the warm grass. It’s the kind of moment that could almost make you like the month of August.
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