Our flower garden in August can be brimming with activities we can do at this time of year, as we can for most of the year. We have some flower gardening tips to give you and some experiments to try. Feel free to send us your own flower gardening tips for any time of the year.

If it is much too hot for you this August to work in your flower garden during the day, make the most of the early morning hours before it gets too warm. Watching the world wake up can be quite exhilirating. Course morning here comes a little later than other places. ;-) This works well in July too.

This month is important in the flower gardening year as its most important work can be taking cuttings. If you have a sunny window ledge within your home or you are lucky enough to have a heated greenhouse, consider taking cuttings of geraniums you planted out in the spring. Not only can you take up and overwinter the older plants from your flower garden, but you can have some newer, younger plants next spring that you start from the cuttings you take now.

As with taking cuttings from many other plants, fuchsias, scented verbena, etc., simply make the cut which severs the cutting just below a joint and trim off the lower leaves. Today it is best if you can use rooting powder first, but simply place the cutting in some light potting soil in a pot. Tamp down the soil firmly. Don't fill the pot to the top as you do need some room for watering. However, the first time you water the soil around your cutting, you may find you need to add more soil. Just do so and tamp that down firmly. Water this added soil as well. However, do not overwater your cutting keeping the soil damp at all times. This will end up decaying your cutting and causing all sorts of unsavory growths on your soil.

You can still do some sowing in your flower garden at this time of year. If you have some vacant spots within your flower garden, try sowing a little pansy seed of some of the more hardy varieties.

You might even try sowing some blue cornflower seed some time before the end of the month. Be sure to thin them out even if you only end up with a half dozen plants left. These August sown plants should end up twice the size of spring-sown ones. Why? Because you are going to pinch out the top of the growth when they are about four inches high. Do this carefully. You should end up with three growths in the place of the one. What happens? You will have a bushier plant. If you wait till spring and do this again to those three growths, you end up with a bushier plant still with many more flowers.

Our last of the flower gardening tips is simply to enjoy your flower garden. We should probably include this advice in everyone of our articles. Sometimes we get too busy with all the doing that a garden needs to keep looking nice and forget to relax and enjoy what we achieve. Even if your major achievement was to plant one pot of flowers for your patio or balcony and that is the extent of your flower garden, pat yourself on the back and enjoy it.

? 2005, Sandra Dinkins-Wilson.

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