Stay busy with gardening work, but take time to enjoy what you’ve accomplished…
During the month of August, things start to slow down a bit in the greenhouses. It’s a welcome bit of time for our staff to catch a breath after a fast-forward spring. It should be a time to enjoy the results of your own hard work, as well. It’s time for you to gloat a little, by saying to the neighbors things like “How about that new variety of petunias in my annual garden– don’t they look great!”… “Do you want another mess of green beans from my garden? They’re really producing!”… or “I’ve picked a dozen big tomatoes from the garden just today!” Of course, we hope you’ll follow such statements with a shameless plug for us, something like “You know, we got all these great plants at Niepagens!” We really like that…

But, wait a minute! Enough of admiring your handiwork and exercising your bragging rights with family and friends… there STILL is work to be done! The arrival of “the dog days of summer” really begins a slow descent towards fall and (brrrrrr) winter. Of course, there still are vegetables to be harvested and maybe even preserved for use in hearty meals during the winter months… there’s still watering and fertilizing to be done (at least on the annual plants)… the lawn still needs to be mowed and trimmed, although the hot days tend to make the grass somewhat dormant, requiring a bit less mowing than in early spring. So, why are we so anxious to get you up off of the lawn chair and back into the garden, you ask? Well, fact is, there really is quite a lot of “prep work” required to get your garden areas ready for the cooler… and then frigid weather ahead. After sitting down and writing a list of things that need to be done during August, even WE were quite surprised at how long the list got! We daresay it may be the longest “to do” list of the year…

To see what we are talking about, take a look at our Gardening Tips for the month of August. You’ll find a pretty exhaustive catalog of work that needs to (or should) be done. In fact, we encourage you to visit our Gardening Tips Page on a regular monthly basis– for good reference on what should be done and when to do it. We want to make you all aware of this special page on our website, if you haven’t visited it in the past– it’s loaded with lots of useful information about gardening month by month. The information there is usually very direct and to the point, too.

Be assured that we, at Niepagens, are always ready to offer advice on any gardening questions that you might have, too. Now, I suppose that it is O.K. for you to finish that glass of iced tea or lemonade, before you get back to work! Who ever said that having a great looking garden was easy!