Hello friends, Gary here.

On Monday I told you to take a pencil down the border while the evidence was still in front of you. I did it on Tuesday evening, which is a day later than I said, and I got as far as the fourth dahlia before the light went.

Four labels. It is a start. The rest of the border is still in my head, where it will be perfectly safe until about November.

What stayed with me afterwards was not the labels. It was how quickly the light went. A little after seven and I was writing by guesswork, holding the label up to the sky to see whether the pencil had taken. Next week the day and the night come level, and from then on the dark gains a few minutes at a time, whether we have finished or not.

The weekend itself is soft. A chance of showers on Friday and Saturday, Saturday the warmer of the two at around twenty-one degrees, then Sunday dry and fresher, with the night dropping to about ten.

Nothing here is urgent. But this is the point in the year where the garden stops asking you to grow things and starts asking you to keep them. The seed that is ripe on the stem. The squash sat on the allotment. The bare bed that will spend the whole winter being rained on if nobody gives it something to hold.

So this weekend is about bringing in and covering over. None of it will look like much by Sunday night.

All of it is about April.

Garden To-Do’s

1. Collect seed from whatever has finished flowering. Save this one for Sunday, because seed wants to be taken dry. Go round with paper envelopes or paper bags — never plastic, which sweats and turns the whole lot mouldy — and look for heads that have gone brown and papery and rattle when you tap them. Calendula, nigella, cosmos, poppies, foxgloves, and any sweet pea pods you missed on the vine. Snip the whole head straight into the bag and write the name and the date on it before you do anything else, because every unlabelled envelope in my shed started life as one I was certain I would remember. Indoors, spread them out somewhere dry and airy for a week, then rub the seed free of the husk and store it cool and dark; an envelope in an old biscuit tin does the job. One honest warning: anything sold as F1 will not come true from saved seed, so save from the older open-pollinated varieties and let the hybrids go.

The Lesson: The plant has already done the hard part. All it asks of us is that we notice before the wind does.

2. Bring the squash in, and then leave them alone for a fortnight. A squash is ready when the stalk has turned hard and woody, the skin has deepened in colour, and you cannot push a thumbnail into it. Cut it with a couple of inches of stalk still attached and never carry it by that stalk, because a snapped one is an open door for rot. Then comes the part most of us skip: curing. Ten days to two weeks somewhere warm and bright — a greenhouse bench, a sunny windowsill — while the skin toughens into something that will see out the winter. After that, somewhere cool and dry. Do not wait for the first frost to make the decision for you; in Norfolk it rarely gives notice, and one cold night turns a winter of soup into a wheelbarrow of mush. Any still green and soft can stay on the plant a little longer, but lift them off the wet ground onto a tile or an offcut of wood.

The Lesson: A harvest is not finished when it leaves the plant. The toughening is part of the ripening.

3. Sow green manure on any bed you have cleared. Beans finished, onions lifted, courgettes pulled — whatever is bare now will stay bare until March unless you do something about it, and bare clay through a wet winter gets its surface beaten flat by the rain and its goodness washed down past where the roots can reach. Grazing rye and winter field beans can both go in now and on into October. The rye makes a dense, fibrous root that works its way through heavy ground; the beans take nitrogen from the air and leave it in the soil. Rake the surface, scatter the rye thinly or push the beans in about two inches deep and six inches apart, and rake over. Saturday's showers can do the watering. In spring, cut it all down and fork it in, then give the bed three or four weeks before you sow anything small, because rye holds back the germination of fine seed while it breaks down.

The Lesson: Empty is not the same as resting. Ground gets through winter better with something holding on to it.

If someone you know is going to be in a garden this weekend, send this to them. The jobs are more fun done badly together.

www.embracegardening.co.uk

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

Mondays are for what the garden has already done. Thursdays are shorter, because the weekend is the point and the reading is not.

Written quickly, for once, because Saturday will not wait.