Don’t hang up the trowel just yet – this month is full of quiet garden jobs that pay off in spring, from bulbs to buds to blooms
While we can look forward to a spectacular display of colours from our deciduous trees and shrubs, this is a good time of year to take stock of the garden – what has done well? What hasn’t? – and then make a plan for next year!
A few jobs for the month …
The big job for October is to clear up your borders, and remove the tired annuals. Then you can plant up for spring with wallflowers, daffodils, alliums and crocus – and perhaps add some winter pansies. There is a wide range of spring-flowering bulbs, corms and tubers available now.
If your summer pots and containers are also looking past their best, clear them out too and either plant them up with winter bedding plants, or add some more bulbs. Try crocus and small daffodils such as Tete-a-tete. Also look for dwarf tulips, and iris reticulata. These miniature bulbs lend themselves to creating displays on tables or in the cold greenhouse, where you can appreciate their blooms close up.
With our milder winters, dahlias may well cope with being left in the ground: the foliage will be blackened by the first frosts – label them now so you know which are your favourites! Make sure you mulch them well, with at least four inches of leaf mould or compost over the tubers.
If you’d rather not take a chance and wish to dig them up, clean off the soil carefully and store the tubers in a crate in a frost-free shed – check them regularly for mould.
Cut back and divide herbaceous perennials, and protect half-hardy plants with leaf mould or compost if you are leaving them in the garden borders. Hardy fuchsias (even though they’re officially deemed hardy) will definitely benefit from this.
Prune rambling and climbing roses once they’ve finished flowering, and tie in the stems before autumn winds cause damage. Then clear up all fallen rose leaves to prevent diseases such as black spot from over-wintering. To avoid spreading any damaging fungi, don’t compost the collected leaves.
This is the month for a big greenhouse-keeping session too: clean and disinfect used pots, all staging surfaces and the inside of the glass with a warm solution of disinfectant to reduce pests and fungal infection.
Prepare the greenhouse for winter sowing and the bringing-in of plants: move potted tender plants (fuchsias, pelargoniums etc), into the greenhouse to overwinter, most will survive happily in a cold greenhouse. Tidy up, remove the growth by half, clear out any weeds in the top of the pots and reduce watering significantly.
