Hello friends, Gary here.

I'm sorry this one is late. Thursday evenings usually have a little space in them, and this one didn't. Olivia turns eleven on Saturday and we are taking her to Birmingham for the day. Between work, lists on the kitchen table and everything remembered at the last possible minute, the day simply ran out.

Last Thursday I wrote about three words on a school wall, chosen for a building full of eleven-year-olds. On Saturday I will have one of my own. I have known it was coming for some time; it still feels as though somebody moved it closer while I wasn't looking.

Housekeeping first, because I promised you honesty. The sweet peas are sown. The greenhouse glass is exactly as I left it, which is to say only just transparent. Two out of three. I have stopped pretending the third is imminent.

It is drizzling as I write, the soft kind that hardly seems to fall at all. Somewhere out there in the dark the lawn is drinking it in through all those holes, or so I am telling myself. I'll go and look properly on Sunday.

Friday is mild, around eighteen degrees with the chance of a shower. Saturday and Sunday turn dry and cooler, fourteen or so, with nights dropping to about seven. For us that means one day in the garden rather than two, so I have kept this weekend's jobs small enough to fit inside a single Sunday.

When I wrote them, I noticed that none of them is for now. Wallflowers that won't flower until April. Beans that won't be picked until June. A tired clump of perennials pulled apart so that it comes back better next summer. Everything going into the ground this weekend is for a version of the garden that doesn't exist yet.

Which feels about right, for a week spent getting ready for eleven.

Garden To-Do’s

1. Plant wallflowers now for colour in April. October is the month for them, and you will see bare-root bundles turning up at garden centres and on market stalls, often wrapped in damp newspaper and sold by the ten. They are cheap and they look like nothing at all, a handful of green tops on a tangle of root. Soak the roots in a bucket of water for an hour before you plant. Wallflowers belong to the cabbage family, so keep them out of any bed where cabbages, sprouts or kale have grown recently, or where you have ever had clubroot. They are happier on clay than most spring bedding, provided the ground doesn't sit wet; work a handful of grit into the worst patches. Plant them about twenty-five to thirty centimetres apart, a little deeper than they were growing, then firm them in hard with your heel. A wallflower that can rock in the winter wind never flowers properly. Water them in. If the tips haven't been pinched out, nip them off now and they will bush out from below. Leave a few gaps between them for tulips, which go in next month.

The Lesson: April's colour is planted in October, in the cold, by someone who cannot see the point yet. It is worth being that person.

2. Lift and divide one tired perennial. You will know the one. A clump that used to flower all the way across and now flowers only round the edge, with a bare, woody patch in the middle like a worn spot in a rug. Hardy geraniums, daylilies, phlox and hostas all do this after a few years, and anything that has finished flowering can be divided now while the soil is still warm. Leave anything still in flower, ornamental grasses and slightly tender plants such as penstemons until spring. Cut the top growth back first so you can see what you are doing. Then lift the whole clump with a fork, taking a wider circle than feels necessary. Split it with two forks pushed in back to back and levered apart, or with a spade; for really stubborn roots an old bread knife does the job. Throw the woody centre on the compost heap. Replant the outer pieces, each about the size of your fist with healthy shoots on it, at the same depth as before, and water them in. On clay, check the ground first. After this week's rain it should be workable, but if it smears on your fork, leave it for another weekend. You will almost certainly end up with more pieces than you have room for. Give them away.

The Lesson: The middle of anything is the oldest part, and the first to give out. The life is always at the edges, where it is still growing.

3. Sow broad beans at the allotment. An autumn sowing gives you beans at the end of May or early June, weeks ahead of a spring sowing, and the plants are usually tough enough by then to shrug off most of the blackfly. Use Aquadulce Claudia, the variety bred for sitting out a winter. Sow the seed five centimetres deep and twenty centimetres apart, in double rows about twenty centimetres apart with a path between each pair. On heavy clay the danger is rot rather than cold, so if your plot is wet, draw up a low ridge and sow along the top of it. Alternatively, start them off in deep pots or root trainers in a cold greenhouse and plant them out next month. Mice will dig the seed up, so cover the rows with fleece or netting until the shoots appear. Then leave them alone. Through the winter they will stand only a few inches tall and look as though they are doing nothing. They are getting their roots down, and that is the whole point.

The Lesson: Staying small through the winter is not failing. Some things spend the cold months holding on, and that is exactly why they are first in spring.

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.