It’s time to enjoy your garden!

It’s August so you get to take a break and enjoy your beautiful flower and veggie gardens 🌹🍅🌱! Annual flowers are at their peak, perennials are putting on a great show and your home grown veggies are feeding your family. What could be better?

But there are still a few small things you can do to make your garden the best it can be, including planting some veggies now for a fall harvest. Scroll down for easy tips and tricks that will help make your outdoor space thrive.

Roses love having their old flowers clipped so new ones can grow in their place. If you’ve been picking stems for bouquets, then you’ve been helping them all along. But even so, you likely still have a few spent blooms that could use deadheading. Cut off old heads an inch or so below the flower — that’s all they need to start blooming again.

Annual flowers, like petunias in your hanging baskets or snapdragons in your garden, prefer a slightly harder prune. Cut those ones back 6” or so from the spent flower heads. That way, they’ll branch out and give you even more stems for lots of flowers right up until it frosts.

Pick herbs in the early morning 🌄before the heat kicks in for the freshest flavour. If you’re storing them for winter recipes, lay your cut herbs on a screen and leave them in a shady corner of your home. Once they’re fully dry, store them in a cool, dark place — they’ll take care of you until your new herbs are growing next summer!

More veggies! Plant now for a fall crop — there’s still time to put beets, carrots, kohlrabi and more into the ground for a fall harvest. Lettuce can be planted up to two weeks before the first frost date — keep those garden fresh salads coming!

Those are just a few of the activities to get keep you going in the garden and to keep your flower and veggie beds looking great!