Gardening Notes

September

• Plant late flowering clematis for seasonal colour.
• This is the best time to establish a new lawn.
• Transplant evergreens.
• Plant spring bulbs.
• Sow hardy annuals for spring.
• Move pots of tender plants like geraniums and fuchsias indoors before first frosts.
• Climbing roses can be pruned once they have finished flowering .
• Plant prepared hyacinth bulbs in pots to flower indoors around Christmas time .
• Start planting spring-flowering biennials, such as wallflowers and forget-me-nots, in garden borders.
• Spring bulbs are already for sale. Pot some now for the earliest display or buy them and keep them cool and dry for a month or so. Once potted they must stay cool; plunging the pots into the soil in a cold frame is ideal. Remember mice love crocus corms.
• Fish out the broad-leaved weed seedlings from newly sown grass and make sure you don’t let fallen leaves lie on it; moulds soon set in during dewy autumn weather.
• Keep alpine plants clear of fallen leaves as this will prevent rotting and other diseases.
• It’s worth gathering up fallen leaves fairly often, before they pile up and make yellow patches. The easiest way is to run over the lawn with a rotary mower set high on a dry day, and whisk them all up into the grassbox. The mix of shredded leaves and light grass clippings makes great compost.
• Collect by hand and burn fallen leaves that are diseased, e.g., those with rose or hypericum rust, black spot, willow anthracnose, etc.
• When perennials spill over on to lawns they kill the grass. It recovers in due course through the winter and early spring, but it does rather spoil the winter picture. Lift the plants up a little by making an arch of cane under them, invisibly, to let in light and air. Shear over the smothered grass beneath to make it bush out again.
• Without getting neurotic about it, keep those leaves cleared up. The ones to worry about are those eddying in the corners of lawns and those sitting on top of cushion plants and alpines. As well as encouraging moulds underneath, fallen leaves are the perfect refuge for slugs.