Now I have my vegetable Garden ready I am itching to get some crops going, but what can I plant at this time of year? I want something I can get quick results from as I’m impatient!

I also want to grow vegetables that we’ll actually use, so I’m going to try Chard (or leaf beet) the variety ‘Bright Lights’ looks great with colourful stems and tastes like spinach, which my husband loves, we’ll also make good use of leeks and beetroot.

Winter lettuce, lambs lettuce, Rocket and Chinese cabbage will do well until November for salads and I’m going to try some radishes and baby carrots as they can crop within 4 weeks.

That’s just what I’m going to try but there are many other vegetables you can grow in August so if your earlier crops have been disappointing don’t give up!

Over the week-end we visited John Browns to get some ready grown Autumn vegetable seedlings and some fruit bushes. As we have limited space in the flat the little packs of seedlings are just perfect meaning we don’t have to germinate them on our limited windowsills, we just planted them straight into the veggie beds after we’d made net cages to stop the local cats using the beds as big litter trays! Some bamboo canes, crop protection netting and cable ties were easy to assemble around the beds and should also keep butterflies and birds off our precious crops.



At Golden Acres we really are ‘Passionate about Plants’. So much so that we grow most of our own bedding plants. At this time of year we review the plants we grew over the Spring and Summer to ensure we keep growing only the best varieties.

Last Wednesday we visited one

of our seed and seedling supplier’s

trials grounds to see what their pick

of the crops were and if any of

the new plants they breed each

year might be good enough

for us to try.

As you can see they have been busy and we were hard pressed to not get carried away ordering all the beautiful new plants they have been breeding.

We took advantage of the weather this week-end and really cracked on with landscaping the garden. We dug out the veggie garden at the far end of the garden and built the two raised veggie beds which I’d bought from our John Browns centre. I’m quite fussy about quality for this sort of thing and was really pleased to have found some strong and sturdy beds that were surprisingly easy to build look great and were relatively in-expensive.

We filled them up with some of the soil we’d dug out mixed with plenty of horse compost to give the soil some bulk and nutrient, well worth the effort and money to ensure we get the strongest healthiest crops.

We then spent a good few hours leveling the other half of the garden ready to build borders and turf.