Your August Homestead Checklist For An Off-Grid Home

Turn your back on a courgette plant for three days, and you'll find one the size of a baseball bat. Smaller ones are firmer and tastier. Big ones are watery and full of seeds.

Iowa State University says to pick courgettes, also called zucchini, when they're about 15 to 20 cm long. That's roughly the length of a pencil. Check the plants every day or two.

So what to plant in August? Every garden bed that empties can grow one more crop before winter. The University of Maryland's calendar, built for a first frost around late October, sows spinach, leaf lettuce, arugula, radishes and turnips outdoors now, and plants out cabbage seedlings. Dates shift a week or two with where you live.

The fruit plants want care too. The RHS, Britain's big gardening charity, says late summer is ideal for rooting strawberry runners: pin each baby plant into a pot of moist compost beside its parent, and cut it free once it roots. When summer strawberries finish, remove the old leaves about 10 cm above the crown, so fresh ones grow.

Apples trained flat against a wall or wire get their summer pruning in mid to late August, once the bottom third of the new shoots is woody. The RHS says to cut new side shoots longer than 20 cm back to three leaves. That keeps growth in check, lets light reach the fruit and sets up next year's crop. Our guide to the off-grid garden covers how much to grow.

Canning means sealing food in jars and heating it, so germs can't spoil it. Summer food can then sit on a shelf until winter. But it has one hidden danger.

Some soil germs make spores, tiny tough seeds that live through boiling. In a sealed jar of low-acid food, the botulism germ can wake up and make a poison you can't see, smell or taste.

So there are two ways to can, and the food decides which one. Acidic foods like most fruit, jam and pickles can go in a boiling water bath. Vegetables, meat and other low-acid foods must go in a pressure canner, which reaches 116 to 121 °C.

The USDA says pressure canning is the only recommended method for vegetables and meat. Always follow a tested recipe, like the ones in the free USDA Complete Guide to Home Canning.

If you live above about 300 metres, add time to water-bath recipes and pressure to pressure-canner recipes, exactly as the tested recipe says.

Tomatoes sit right on the border between acidic and not. So they need a helper however you can them, in a boiling water bath or even a pressure canner: 2 tablespoons of bottled lemon juice or 1/2 teaspoon of citric acid per quart jar (just under a litre), half that per pint.

Bottled juice is used because its strength is always the same. Our guide to food preservation explains why the acid matters so much.

Herbs are easy to dry with no power at all. NC State University says to cut them in the early morning, once the dew has dried, and before they flower.

Tie them in small bundles and hang them upside down somewhere warm, dry and airy, out of direct sun. They're ready when the leaves are brittle and crumble easily. Store them in airtight jars somewhere cool and dark.

You can dry fruit in the sun itself, but only in the right weather. The US National Center for Home Food Preservation says sun drying needs temperatures of at least 29 °C and air that's not too damp. It's for fruit only, never vegetables or meat.

An electric food dryer is more reliable. It runs at about 60 °C for hours, so on an off-grid system, run it on sunny mornings when the panels can carry it. Our guide to working out your power needs helps you see what a new machine adds.

The power drops quickly from here. In Amsterdam, panels make about 3.2 kilowatt-hours a day per kilowatt in September and only 2.1 in October.

So use August to get ready. Book the chimney sweep before the autumn rush, so October's sweep has a date. The generator can rest until October.

Underground water rises and falls with the seasons, like a slow tide. Penn State says groundwater usually reaches its lowest point in late September or October, after a summer of plants drinking and little rain soaking in.

So late summer is when a shallow well can run short. Give the garden a drink at the roots, keep June's mulch topped up to hold the moisture in, fix dripping taps and save the big jobs for after a good rain. Our guide to off-grid wells explains what makes a well run dry.

In dry places, late summer is fire season. Flying sparks, called embers, can travel far ahead of a wildfire and land right next to a house.

The NFPA, the US fire protection group, calls the first 1.5 metres around a house the "immediate zone". It says that strip should be non-combustible, which means nothing in it can burn. To protect the house, remove bark chips, firewood and dry leaves from that strip. Think gravel, stone and bare soil instead.

Further out, up to about 9 metres, keep plants trimmed and spaced apart. When you plan a new home, where it sits on the land matters as much as its walls, and our guide to building an off-grid home starts there.

Canning is great for cutting waste. The US National Center for Home Food Preservation says glass canning jars can be reused many times, and so can the metal bands that screw on.

The flat lids are different. They seal only once, so each jar needs a new lid every time. Our guide to off-grid recycling shows why reusing comes before recycling.

Canning day leaves a mountain of peels, cores and tomato skins. Treat them like July's fruit scraps: bury them under 10 to 20 cm of browns, so flies and animals don't find them.