Before the autumnal equinox

Little happens in my life without a deadline. There is a jumble of ‘wouldn’t it be lovely tos’ (jam-making, reading novels, a weekend away to the Gunard’s Head, painting my toenails gold), the ‘I really should’s’ (brushing the dogs, booking someone to look at the dry rot, switching my electricity supplier over), and there are the ‘musts’.

Musts come from promises I have made to others, report deadlines, dates in the diary that refuse to shift and increasingly in September, musts come from the passing of days as we slide in autumn.

Only musts really happen in my life, and so this is what I have been fitting in before the window of opportunity closes. 

Sowing hardy annuals

Before the equinox is best and so there really is a date deadline for this one. I have written a lot on this but if you are not sure what you are doing, it is probably best to just chuck some seed around and risk it, than try and do things perfectly and not get anything in the ground. You’d be amazed how much seeds want to grow. I think they are sensing the deadline too. 

Read more about hardy annual sowing here, or read the full seed sowing guide here.

 Collecting seed

Yesterday, I held the very first of my Piggy Sue sweet pea harvest in my hand. I was only really testing them and I opened one of the pods that had turned a pale blonde and there they were; a row of utterly perfect black peas. I was only doing it in passing so I didn’t have anything with me for collecting, so the inaugural harvest is currently in my jeans pocket with a piece of string and some dog biscuits. However, this week, I will be much more organised and take envelopes, bowls, jars, labels and bags out with me. The deadline on this one is also a firm one; miss your moment and the seeds will be scattered to the four winds. 

For sweet peas, this is the sort of colour you are looking for:

If you are feeling lucky/experimental/curious/brave, then saving dahlia seeds is always a laugh. I have a few of the single ones which have fully dried (deadheading dahlias got stuck on the ‘I really should’ list but as I just grow them recreationally for me, I didn’t stress unduly) and the seeds just fall out. Sow in spring, not now.

There really is a fine art to judging readiness of seed. Touch, sight and sound all play a part in picking the perfect moment. If the seed have fully turned in colour and are coming loose to the touch, then time is of the essence. The first picture is focused on a daucus carrot seed head that is nearly ready but not quite. The second is one that I will be cutting and saving today as a matter of urgency.

Compost

Emptying the done compost heap, top dressing the beds where I know there is poorer soil, and laying a new heap. 

There are a few beds around the place with swiss chard in. I love it, it’s a great winter veg and I defy anyone not to get through tonnes of it in the cold, dark months once they have perfected Nigel Slater’s chard gratin. I sowed it in thick lines in one of the beds in the kitchen garden and, once it was up, I took the thinnings and planted some in another bed, and some in a bed in the flower field. The chard left in the original bed is small and, more worryingly, yellow-ish. The transplants in the other bed in the kitchen garden are small but stronger in colour. The ones in the flower field are a jungle and the most gloriously thick, lush, gorgeous candy-striped green colours. 

(There is one difference of course, which is that the ones in the kitchen garden, being closer to the back door, get harvested and picked at much more often. However, not enough to account for the difference.)

If you have been growing on your ground for a while, you will develop a sense for the terroir. Different beds grow very differently based on different drainage, aspect, hot and cold spots, different mycorrhizal systems, all sorts of things. Some of this you will understand (I know which beds have been top dressed when and with what) and some of which you won’t. The bed that I put the crab apple espaliers in is known to be the cursed bed. Nothing grows in it except ground elder and no, I have absolutely no idea why. I risked a limelight hydrangea recently and even that has just turned its toes up and died. 

I’m looking for an oak bench to go in it as the only means of using it without heartbreak. 

For all the other beds, I am solving the problem and putting thick layers of compost, that black gold, on top. Some of the beds I have cleared but even where there are plants in situ, I am tucking as much as I can in amongst and around. The photo above is not entirely representative; I rarely underlay with cardboard. I have never put a scrap of cardboard on soil without it being smothered in slugs. Slugs adore cardboard. I usually just hoe lightly and then pile compost on the soil.

Exception to this is bearded irises. You need to be really careful to not cover the rhizome. Ditto peonies, if you pile it on too thick around the crown, they become too deeply buried and you might lose blooms. However, compost does sink remarkably fast as the worms pull it down into the soil, so unless you are putting inches directly on top of the crown, it should be fine. 

We have produced a lot of plant material in the last week. We pulled out the meadow, quite a blissful task because the soil was friable and soft, and few of the plants were deep rooted. I now have a windrow of stems and roots ready to form the basis of a new heap. Even though this is going to be a slow heap (it is unlikely to get very hot and so I will have to leave it quite a long time) it will need some greens on so I will mix it with one of the hotter heaps which is primarily grass clippings and fresh leaves, add some biodynamic preparations and then leave it to do its thing for as long as I can.

Planting out biennials

My foxgloves are starting to look like they really want to get going. They are still in the greenhouse at the moment and I have learned the hard way that over-wintering biennials under glass means zero flowers the next year. They need the cold to trigger flowering. If you are clearing beds of the summer annuals that are over, this would be the perfect time to give them a new home. If you would like to interplant with tulips then put the biennials out now in their pots so they feel the chill coming on, and then you can put then in the ground at the same time as you put the bulbs in in November. 

Watch out for self-sown annuals

I have ammi all over the place and I haven’t sown a single one. They are, of course, in inconvenient places but that is gardening for you; nature and fate have one idea about how to do things, and I have another. Read this for what to do with them. 

Divide and conquer

If you have clumps of herbaceous perennials that are starting to look a bit thuggish, now would be the perfect time to dig them up and split them. You can be surprisingly brutal with this although the chunks should be big enough to give flowers soon (think a minimum of a 9cm pot; if you wouldn’t buy it in a garden centre then it’s probably too small). 

I have split all my campanulas. Although it is recommended that sanguisorba is divided in spring, I need to move mine and I want lots of them, so it is going to be done now regardless. There is a bit of growing time left in the season for them to get some roots down before the winter and I think they’ll be fine. 

Planting up new schemes

I have redesigned lots of areas of the garden since we changed the layout and I have bought a lot of new plants. Like with the sanguisorba, there is warmth in the soil, there is a bit of time for them to get settled in their new spot, and they will romp away in the spring. 

There is a whole series of blog posts about the planning of planting schemes, locating them, sourcing and combining plants so I won’t say any more now, only to strongly recommend that if you have been seduced into buying any plants recently, get them into the ground sooner rather than later. 

Lots of people recommend planting spring bulbs in September. I place this firmly in the category of ‘wouldn’t it be lovely to’. I don’t know about you, but I already have got enough on.

Consider this permission to carry that over into October.