I went into the shed on Saturday for a ball of twine and came out with a notebook I had forgotten I owned. It has one page for every September going back some years, and each page has three lines on it in my own handwriting. Last year's three lines told me exactly what to do about the summer I have just had. I read them, put the kettle on, and sat with the fact that I had done none of them.

"One year's seeding, seven years' weeding."

— Traditional gardening proverb

(7 min read)

Hello friends, Gary Stewart here.

On Saturday morning I went into the shed for a ball of twine and could not find it, which meant opening the drawer under the bench, which is where things go when I cannot decide what to do with them. Half a bag of bonemeal. Three pencil stubs. A pair of secateurs I have twice replaced because I was certain they were lost.

And an A6 notebook with a soft grey cover, cockled from damp, with a brown ring on the front where a mug of tea once stood.

I took it outside and sat on the step and turned to the last page I had written on. September, a year ago. Three lines, in blue biro, in my handwriting, under the date.

Move the dahlias out of the bottom corner.

Second water butt on the shed.

Fewer tomatoes. Six plants. Not fourteen.

I have done one of those three things. I did it in the third week of August, five months after buying the butt, and I only did it because I had written a newsletter telling all of you to do it first and then stood in the kitchen doorway watching a shed roof's worth of rain run past the downpipe and away down the path. I have already confessed to that. I am not going to make you sit through it twice.

But the other two lines are the ones that have been sitting on my chest since Saturday.

The dahlias are still in the bottom corner. That corner is the driest ground I own: full sun, thin soil over compacted clay, the last place any water reaches and the first place it leaves. And so for six weeks of this summer, every evening at half past seven, I carried two cans down the path to keep alive a group of plants that I had personally identified, in writing, twelve months ago, as being in the wrong place.

That is not a mistake. A mistake is when you did not know. I knew. I had written it down.

And the tomatoes — I grew fourteen again. Olivia will eat them only if she cannot see them, which is to say in a sauce, with the evidence removed. Cody will not go near them. That is roughly eleven plants' worth of fruit given away over the fence, or gone soft on the kitchen windowsill while I told myself I would do something with them at the weekend.

Why the plan fails

I want to be careful here, because the obvious conclusion is that I am lazy, and I do not think that is quite it.

Here is what I think actually happens.

The plan gets written in September, when the garden is standing right in front of you and cannot be argued with. And then it gets read in January. It gets read on a wet Tuesday evening in the middle of winter, when the beds are bare and brown and every plant that failed has been cut down and taken away, and the memory of the failing has gone soft in the same way the notebook cover has. And next to the plan, on the same table, is a seed catalogue.

In January you are not planning. You are shopping. You are looking at photographs of other people's dahlias in other people's soil, taken in the ten days of the year those dahlias looked like that, and what you write down is not a decision but a wish.

So the September page loses. Every time. It loses to a photograph.

The thing I understood on the step on Saturday, with a cold mug of tea going colder, is that the plan does not fail because I am weak in March. It fails because I am not reading it in August, while the evidence is still standing.

The garden is a witness statement, and it is about to be withdrawn

Right now — this week, the last of August, the first of September — my garden is telling the truth about itself more clearly than it will at any other point in the year.

Everything that struggled is still out there struggling, visibly, where I can see it. Everything that carried the year is still carrying it. The gap where the second row of beans should have been is still a gap. The border by the fence is still leaning into the path, and I can see exactly which three things are doing the leaning and how far apart they should have been. The dry corner is still dry; the wet corner by the compost bins, where I have never seen a puddle before this month, has now shown me it can hold one.

In eight weeks, none of that will be visible. It will be cut down, or blackened by frost, or under a mulch, and I will be planning from memory and from a photograph and from hope.

This fortnight is the audit. Not January. This fortnight, with a pencil.

So on Sunday afternoon I walked the whole garden slowly with the notebook and did not plant anything, weed anything or tidy anything, which took a certain amount of restraint. And the garden told me three things, and every single one of them is a subtraction.

One: plant to the site, not to the picture.

The dry corner is a dry corner. It was a dry corner last year and it will be a dry corner in 2027, and every spring I plant it as though this might be the year it isn't. Dahlias want moisture and feeding and a soil that holds something; I have given them the meanest ground in the garden and then spent my evenings correcting for it by hand.

They are coming out. Not being improved, not being mulched into some better version of themselves — moved. And going into that corner instead: things that come from hard, thin, sun-baked ground and consider it perfectly normal. The garden already showed me which those are; it showed me all summer, while I was busy carrying cans past them.

Two: put the roots in now, not in April.

This is the one that has genuinely changed how I intend to garden.

Look at what came through the drought here. Established perennials, deep-rooted things, plants that had been in the ground two years or more. And look at what did not: everything I planted in April. The newly planted perennials were the plants I could least afford to lose and the ones that needed the most from me, because a plant that went into the ground eight weeks before a drought has nothing underneath it. It has not had time to make anything.

A root system is not built in a season of flowering. It is built in the quiet months, in warm damp ground, when nothing is happening above the surface at all.

Which is now. The soil here is still holding real warmth — we have had a run of low twenties by day and it is dropping to twelve or thirteen at night, with heavy dew by morning — and the ground is properly damp for the first time since June. A perennial planted in the next six weeks will put on root through October and into November while the top of it does nothing visible whatsoever. By next June it has something to draw on. Planted in April, it spends its first summer building the thing it needed to have already built.

So: no spring planting order this year. The order goes in now.

Three: do the subtraction on purpose.

Every year the plan is more. More tomatoes, another kind of bean, eleven different things in a border that would look better with four. And every year, somewhere around the middle of July, the year does the subtracting for me.

This summer it did it brutally. Three weeks into the dry spell I sat down and wrote a list of everything I was going to stop watering, because I could not water all of it — and I want to be honest about what that list actually was. It was a plan for next year. It was me deciding, under pressure, in a panic, with a hosepipe ban coming, which plants had earned their place in this garden.

And the odd thing is that it was a good list. Almost everything on it was something I would have chosen to let go anyway, if I had ever sat down calmly and chosen.

So this time I am doing it calmly. Six tomatoes. Four things in that border, not eleven. Half the veg bed given over to one crop rather than five, so that I might actually eat the crop instead of admiring the variety.

Less, done properly, is not a smaller ambition. It is the only version of the ambition that survives a hard July.

The other pages

There is one more thing, and then I will let you go.

Sitting on the step, I turned back through the earlier pages. There are more of them than I expected. Some years I have written five lines, some years only one. September before last just says "nets", which I no longer understand.

And on the 2023 page, underneath my three lines, in enormous wobbling capitals in a different hand, someone has written CODY. That is all. Just his name, taking up four lines' worth of space, from a boy who was three and could not yet have told you what a notebook was for.

He has just turned six now. He watered a sunflower through the whole of this summer with a jam jar. Olivia was measured against the verbena last week and lost by a couple of inches, which she will not do next year.

I thought I was holding a record of a garden. I was holding a record of the years, and there are not an unlimited number of them, and I have spent several of them writing down the same three lines and not doing them.

So I have written this year's page. Three lines, same as always, but smaller ones — small enough that there is no version of March in which I can pretend they are too big.

Dahlias out of the bottom corner. By October.

Nothing new planted after March.

Six tomatoes.

And then I went out with a handful of canes and put one next to each dahlia clump, with a label, so that in six weeks when the tops have gone black and there is nothing above ground to tell me where anything is, I will still know exactly what I am moving.

That took eleven minutes. The line has been on the page for a year.

Gardening Tips

1. Walk the garden with a pencil while the evidence is still standing. Give it half an hour, and do not weed, deadhead or tidy while you are doing it — the tidying is what stops the looking. Note the gaps, note what is flopping into the path and how far apart those plants actually are, note which ground dried first and which held a puddle this month. Photograph each border. In November all of this will be invisible and you will be planning from memory.

The Lesson: A record made while the difficulty is still in front of you is worth ten made afterwards, when it has softened into a story.

2. Lift, divide and move perennials now, while the soil is warm and damp. This is the best window of the year for it and it lasts about six weeks. Water the plant well the day before, lift the whole clump, and split it — two forks back to back for the tough ones, a spade straight through the middle for the brutal truth. Discard the tired, woody centre and replant the vigorous outer sections, at the same depth, and water them in properly. They will root away through October while nothing appears to be happening.

The Lesson: The right moment to move something is not when it looks its worst, but when it has enough left in it to recover from being moved.

3. Sow hardy annuals now for next summer. Calendula, cornflower, ammi, larkspur, nigella and poppies can all go in over the next fortnight, direct or in modules. They germinate in the warmth, sit as small tough plants through the winter, and start next spring with a root system that a March-sown seedling will not have until June. They flower earlier, taller, and for longer, and they do not need watering to do it.

The Lesson: Whatever is going to hold you up next summer is being built now, in the dark, where nobody is looking at it.

Garden To-Do’s

1. Empty the seed tin onto the table before you order a single packet. Sort it into what is in date, what is worth risking, and what should go in the bin. Most seed keeps three or four years in a cool dry tin; parsnip, onion and leek keep about one, and will let you down in spring without telling you why. Write your order from what is missing, not from what looks good in a catalogue.

2. Order spring bulbs this week and get the daffodils in. Daffodils and other narcissi want planting in September while the soil is still warm, at roughly three times the depth of the bulb. Crocus, alliums and camassia can go in through the autumn. Tulips are the exception — hold those back until November, once the cold has come, which greatly reduces the risk of tulip fire.

3. Turn the compost heap and get the autumn's material layered properly. Much of what went on during the dry spell will have gone in dry and simply stopped; break it up, mix it with green material and grass clippings, and water it as you go. A heap turned now, while there is still warmth in it, will give you something usable by spring — which is exactly when you will want it for everything you are about to plant.

Plan While the Evidence Is Standing. The truthful account of this year is currently outside, in the ground, visible, and it will be gone in a matter of weeks. What you write down now comes from what happened; what you write down in January comes from what you would like to have happened. Only one of those is worth following.

The Subtraction Happens Either Way. No year lets you keep everything. If you do not choose what to let go of while you are calm, a dry July will choose for you while you are not — and the strange thing is that its choices are usually the right ones. Better to make them yourself, in September, with a cup of tea, than in a panic with a watering can.

Roots Before the Summer. Everything that walked through this drought did it on work that was finished long before the drought began. The ground is warm for another six weeks; whatever goes into it now will spend the whole of the dark half of the year growing quietly downward, while you are indoors and have entirely stopped thinking about it. That is not a lost season. That is the season the next one is made in.

Gary Stewart writes every week from a small garden on Norfolk clay.

No expertise, no ideal garden, just what the soil taught him that week.

Written slowly, at the speed of the garden, for people who read every word.