* As you drag the hose around, don’t forget that the compost needs water along with everything else. It won’t die if it gets desiccated, but it won’t decompose either. It can be a low priority if there’s plenty of space to make a new pile ( or piles!) at cleanup time. Otherwise it will be very convenient to have a nice open place to heap the frost-blasted dahlia stems and chopped up autumn leaves. Plus fall plantings benefit from lots of compost, which is often in short supply by the end of the growing season.

* It’s time – past time, really – to sow cover crops in annual and vegetable beds that are starting to fade. The payoff in improved soil health is worth the effort it takes to clean out tired plants and find winter rye seed. If you don’t expect frost for at least 6 more weeks, you can plant tender alternatives like buckwheat or field peas instead. They will still be small when they get killed, so they won’t make as much green manure, but because they will rot down over the winter you won’t have to till them in next spring.

We have inadvertently discovered how to create a monarch nursery: mow an overgrown field that has some established milkweed in it. Six weeks ago, Bill took the old beater mower and leveled a 20 by 10 foot section right down to the dead thatch. The spot looked to be mostly full of goldenrod and blackberries , but there was also a good bit of milkweed – which of course means a ton of milkweed roots. As soon as we cleared out the competition, a forest of baby milkweed rose up, much faster off the mark than the blackberries (though they will win in the end). Almost every one of those tender young milkweeds has played host to a monarch caterpillar - or two or even three. We checked the tall, tough plants in the unmowed field: nada.
The hummingbirds are sitting around, always a sign summer is almost gone, and the Japanese beetles are ebbing after a particularly bad year. They’re still lunching the most vulnerable roses but there are almost none in the raspberries. Dry weather has made the Fall Gold berries even crumblier than usual, but it has made them sweeter, too. Same goes for the Boothby Blondes, our favorite cucumber. It’s a Maine heirloom with cream colored skin, black spines, and seeds that are almost sugary, especially when they (the seeds) are young. I keep waiting for it to be the darling of every farmers’ market, but meanwhile it’s very easy to grow. Seed Savers Exchange sells the seeds: www.seedsavers.org.

* This is a good time to cast a cold eye on your summering houseplants and ask: would I buy this thing if I were browsing at the nursery? Would I buy it if it were on sale? Would I pick it up if it were sitting on the curb with a “free” sign around its neck? You know what to do if all answers are no. Most of the plants that remain are likely to need cutting back and re-potting before being moved to a shadier spot, which should be done fairly soon. There is still a fair amount of outdoor time left, but it helps to get them used to low light before they must go indoors.

* It takes at least 6 weeks – often more - for a baby winter squash to reach full size and ripen thoroughly , so before long it will be time to tip-prune the vines and remove new fruits and flowers. Plants that can put all their energy into just 4 or 5 large fruits are the ones that produce great squash. Just count back from your expected first frost date to find the optimum pruning time. The vine tips and baby squash are sometimes tasty, sometimes quite bitter. Try sautaéing a sample in butter or olive oil before putting all that (potentially) high-end vegetable material on the compost heap.

* If you have been feeding roses, don’t forget to stop. Succulent young growth needs plenty of time to toughen up before cold weather, and you don’t want to encourage the plants to keep making more of it.

The Garden Reporter is on vacation, far from the overflowing gardens, so all I can say is that neighbors have been begged to pick: ” …no, please, take as much as you want.” You’d think it would be easy to give away things like tomatoes and beans and bouquets. But we usually come back to find at least a few baseball-bat zucchini and a solid week of deadheading (people seem far more willing to take food than to cut flowers). At least the lawn is in the August doldrums and will not miss the mower.

Don’t be misled by thunderstorms; unless you’re right under every one of ‘em, August is dry, water-worry time. Most of the Northeast had lots of rain last spring, so established perennials, shrubs and trees should still be in pretty good shape, but annuals are likely to be getting pretty thirsty.

* If you have to ration water in the food garden, give the first drinks to tomatoes, peppers, beans, leafy items like lettuce and chard, and any young fruiting plants - like squash or peas - you planted for autumn crops. Don’t worry about melons and summer squash that are already producing – plants may look wilty at midday, but once the fruit is set it’ll taste better if it ISN”T irrigated.

* Among annual flowers, give preference to those that will keep blooming after frost: asters, calendulas, honeywort , snapdragons, stocks … And don’t forget that big plants in pots are practically on hydroponics by now - those pots have more roots than soil in them and may need water as often as twice a day.

* Inconsistent water supplies lead to blossom end rot in tomatoes, and being where it’s on the blossom end you often don’t notice it until the rotten part gets huge. But why let the tomato plant waste energy on failures? It only takes a minute to get down , look up, find the ailing fruits and get rid of them. If getting down far enough to look up isn’t easy, you can just gently turn large tomatoes that appear to be ripening. With any luck, that’s what they’re doing, but changing color can also signal that something’s going wrong.

There isn’t much reason to bother with shoes when you’re just darting out to move the hose, especially now that the straw mulch on the paths is all soft and broken in. The problem is that late summer is also when many tall plants have fallen over, laying their flowering stems on said paths. Ms. Sausage-foot is thus able to report that ammonia DOES quickly dull the pain when you’ve gotten the mother of all bee stings, but don’t expect it to do anything about swelling.
A more tidy type would long ago have ripped up the bolted chicory – beautiful blue flowers be damned. And in the old days even I would have tried to do something about the thick cosmos stalks, broken at the base, that are now flowering at ankle height. Self-sown morning glories would have been ripped out – or given something besides the dahlias to climb … No more. The August garden is now a many-leveled thing and none the worse for it.

Take advantage of the wilting heat to fiddle with crisp stems that are prone to breakage: tie up floppy dahlias, unravel wayward bean and morning glory vines, tuck tomato branches back where they belong in the trellis. At midday these plants are limp and easy to work with – assuming you’re not so limp yourself you can’t bear to be out there.

This is about last call to cut back repeat-blooming roses – new growth needs quite a while to toughen up before freezing weather. But cutting them back is well worth doing ; by now a lot of the old foliage is bound to be freckled with blackspot or turned to lace by the Japanese beetles. Removing it instantly makes things look better, and it usually results in a good flush of fall bloom.

Even when it’s too hot to work, it’s not too hot to write, and the notes you take now will come in mighty handy when it’s seed and plant order time. Which tomatoes are ripening soonest? Which ones are fighting off the blight? Is there a rose that doesn’t appeal to our little brown and green pals? Which daylily is covered with buds, its blooming days still to come? You might think you will remember this stuff, but the chances are you won’t.

I did follow my own advice in the matter of the bush beans, planting only very short rows, but we are still being inundated. It’s all the fault of the obscene heat - it’s forcing the pole beans to start pumping ‘em out much sooner than usual. These are late pole beans, they’re supposed to FOLLOW the bush beans, but evidently somebody forgot to tell them that. And of course like everything else you have to keep picking or they won’t keep beaning.

The thing to do at a time like this is to give ‘em away, so I called the Food Bank of the Hudson Valley and sure enough, they maintain a huge list of pantries and soup kitchens – six counties’ worth - and are more than glad to help you find a few nearby. Their phone number is 845 534 5344, website’s foodbankofhudsonvalley.org, and the counties they cover are Dutchess, Orange, Putnam Rockland, Sullivan and Ulster.

It may take a couple of tries – last time I did this ( not around here) it took a while to find a place that could use garden extras: soup kitchens don’t always have enough workers to mess around with fresh produce, pantries can’t always store it. But this time there’s an easy solution. The food bank picks up leftovers at some farmers’ markets, so gardeners who coordinate it right can hand off the beans – or whatever else is in overflow mode – when they go to pick up eggs and cheese.