Late Winter Preparation.

Plant broccoli, carrots, cos lettuce, onions and potatoes, and keep salad greens coming with successive sowings. Herbs are reliable now: parsley, chives, oregano, sage and thyme. Hold warm-season crops out of garden beds for now. Tomato, capsicum and chilli seedlings can be raised under cover in preparation for planting once conditions are reliably warmer.

Last of the winter brassicas, kale, silverbeet, carrots, beetroot, broad beans, snow peas.

Potato — A cool-season tuber crop still rated strongly for August planting. Plant certified seed potatoes in fertile, free-draining soil, hill the stems as they grow, and lift 14–18 weeks later once the foliage yellows and dies back.

Parsley — One of the most dependable August herbs. Sow or transplant into rich, moist soil in sun to part shade, and pick outer stems first so the plant keeps producing well into spring.

Mulch every bed you've planted. Late-winter westerlies dry soil faster than summer heat.

Aphids on tender new growth in the winter beds. Ladybirds are already hunting — don't spray broad-spectrum.

Soil temperature, not air temperature, tells you when to sow. A cheap $15 soil thermometer is the best tool a subtropical gardener owns.

Sow one cool-season crop you've never grown — a new brassica, a different carrot, an unfamiliar salad leaf. August still rewards planting.

Learn how soil temperature influences germination and transplanting. As spring approaches, soil temperature becomes one of the best indicators of when warm-season crops are ready to move from protected conditions into the garden.