GIVE YOUR PLOT A LATE SUMMER SPRUCE-UP
As the season draws to a close, it’s time to clear patio debris, replace tired plants and restore order to your outdoor space,
BACK from your summer travels? Are your hanging baskets looking a little sorry, your pots pathetic and your borders brimming with weeds? Here are some easy but effective garden tidy-up tips...
Save it: Save what you can, deadheading late-flowering blooms in borders which may come back to life. Perennials which have finished flowering can be cut back but will come back to life next year.
Ditch it: If your hanging baskets and pots of annuals have dried out, take them down and empty the contents onto the compost heap. Buying springflowering bulbs and, if you want late colour, pop into the garden centre to find some. Try asters, chrysanthemums and nerines, rudbeckias and sedums.
Tend to the lawn: With the hot summer we’ve had, the lawn might be looking like hay and shouldn’t need cutting. If it has grown substantially though, leave the blades on the highest setting for the first cut, reduce the height at the next a few days later, and then cut at the normal height. Lose the weeds: Look over your beds and borders and if weeds have sprung up, get rid of them quickly. Seeds shed at this time of year, which means more work later on.
Harvest now: If you have a vegetable patch, harvest as much ripe produce as you can now, to stop the veg running to seed or becoming over-ripe. You can blanch (immerse in boiling water) and freeze many veg, so you don’t end up wasting what you pick. Clear space for new crops... Find time to clear vacant rows in the veg patch and refill them with autumn and winter crops.
Put away pots for winter... If you have empty pots you’re not going to use again this year, clean them with diluted disinfectant and stow in the shed for winter.
Plan for next year... Take time to write a list of what you are going to include and exclude in your plantings next year.