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August in the garden is a month filled with harvesting the tasty fruits (or veggies) of your labors like tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers. Taking lots of notes on the successes and failures of your 2019 garden to help you plan for next Spring, and finally planting a Fall crop.

Pull out or divide perennial flowers that may be taking over and replant them in bare spots making room for new plantings. You may want to deadhead flowers, encouraging them to rebloom until the first frost. Prepare sunny areas now where you'll be able to plant perennials like fruiting trees, shrubs, and berries for future years of harvest.

With marijuana becoming legal in numerous states, there are now many people who grow their own and have done so successfully. From our experience with irrigation systems and visiting many of these legally licensed grows from setup to harvest, it's the quality of products and the grower's daily attention to detail that makes a big difference. Here are some basics to consider before you choose the best irrigation products.

Without beneficial insects and their ability to aid in plant pollination, 90 percent of all flowering plant species might disappear. Thirty percent of all plants in the world would not exist if it weren’t for pollinators. Your vegetable garden wouldn’t be as productive. We all need to do what we can to provide a beneficial habitat for them on our property. Pollinators are insects and other animals that move pollen from one flower to the next, fertilizing it and allowing it to reproduce via seed. Butterflies, bees, birds, bats, other insects, and even ants are some of the many pollinators that are so important. What can you and I do to help?

The story of modern drip irrigation begins with a man named Simca Blass, an engineer who in 1947 was working on the first modern aqueduct in the Jordan Valley, of Israel. After discovering a large tree that was growing "without water", he dug down to find a leaking pipe coupler that was supplying water to the tree. He bought up the pipes that England had used to extinguish fires during the London Blitz and shipped them home where they were used to construct a water system to supply water to 11 Israeli settlements and the Arab Bedouins in the Negev desert. In the 1950s Blass reopened his engineering office and pursued his idea of commercial drip irrigation.

If you want to start a garden this year, it may not be too late. Look for a sunny spot near your house to start gardening as it will be easy to keep an eye on it. With the right soil and adequate watering, your garden is sure to be a great success.

If this is your first garden, start small. Two or three 3’x 12’ raised beds or a 12’ x 12’ plot is a reasonable size that you could begin to, plant in one weekend, and be successful. A small garden irrigation kit (Small Garden Bed Kit) can have you set up for watering in an hour without having to search for parts. Even a small garden can produce as much or more like a larger one. Extensive gardens often become very time-consuming and overwhelming for the first-time gardener. Keep it simple, and you will enjoy hours of gardening each year.

Easy to install, long lasting, and having the ability to precisely deliver water exactly where you want it are qualities that every busy gardener is looking for. If you have raised beds, an orchard, ornamental trees, row crops, hedges along a fence line, berry crops, containers on a deck, an extensive landscape, a small front yard, or a greenhouse or high tunnel, then ½” Emitter Tubing or ¼” Soaker Dripline are great choices.