Hello friends, Gary here.

On Monday I made you a promise about the hedge, and I made myself the same one. I kept it.

The cut happened on Tuesday evening. About halfway along the front I did what I said I would. I switched off the trimmer, came down the ladder and walked out onto the pavement to look back. I didn't find a mistake. What made it worth doing is that I nearly didn't bother. My arms wanted to keep going and so did the light. Standing there with the trimmer ticking as it cooled, I could see the line was holding, and the second half went on at the same pace as the first.

I am pleased with it. I don't often write that about my own work in the garden, so I will leave it there before I talk myself out of it.

When the sheet came up, though, the ground underneath looked worse than ever by comparison. It was ten years of dropped needles on dry grey clay, sitting in the shadow of something that now looks sharp.

The equinox came and went in the small hours of Wednesday while we were all asleep. From here the nights are longer than the days, and the garden starts letting go of things. Needles, leaves, seed, the last of the fruit.

The weekend is dry all the way through. It will be around twenty degrees each afternoon and down to ten at night. There are no excuses in it.

So this weekend is about what falls, and about putting things into the ground that nobody will see again until spring.

Everything that falls comes back, as long as you give it somewhere to land.

Garden To-Do’s

1. Clear and mulch the base of the hedge. Whatever hedge you have, the strip of ground along its foot is probably the most ignored soil in the garden. It is dry, because the hedge drinks first and keeps the rain off. It is shaded. And it is full of whatever has blown in and stayed. Get down on your knees with a hand fork and pull out anything that shouldn't be there: grass creeping in from the lawn, bramble seedlings, the odd self-sown sycamore that will be a tree by spring if you let it. Rake out the loose debris, but don't strip it bare. A thin layer of the hedge's own litter does no harm. Then check the soil with a trowel. Mulch locks in whatever moisture is already there, so if it comes up dusty, give it a long soak first. Spread five to seven centimetres of well-rotted compost or manure along the length, and keep it a hand's width clear of the stems themselves, because wet mulch against bark invites rot. If your hedge is yew, bag the clippings from the cut separately and keep them well away from anything a child, a dog or a horse might get to.

The Lesson: We look after what people see. The part that holds everything up is usually the part we have never knelt down in front of.

2. Build a leaf-mould cage before the leaves come down. Most of the leaves are still on the trees, and that is exactly why this weekend is the time. In a month you'll be raking without anywhere to put them. All you need is four stakes knocked into a shady corner about a metre apart, with chicken wire stapled or tied round them. It takes an hour and it's ugly, and it will give you the best free soil improver there is. Fill it as the autumn goes on. Oak, beech and hornbeam leaves break down beautifully. Keep out anything evergreen, including yew needles, laurel and holly, because they take years and some of them are toxic. If the leaves go in dry, wet them as you add them, because leaf mould is made by fungi, and fungi need damp. Then leave it. In a year it will be crumbly enough to mulch a border. In two it will be fine enough to go into a potting mix. No bin bags, no bonfire, no trips to the tip.

The Lesson: The garden throws nothing away. Only we do, and usually because we didn't have a place ready when it arrived.

3. Plant garlic at the allotment. Garlic needs a proper cold spell in the ground to split into cloves, and an autumn planting gives it the whole winter to get its roots down before it thinks about growing up. Anywhere from now until November works. Buy bulbs meant for planting from a garden centre or seed supplier. Supermarket garlic often carries disease and is usually a variety grown for somewhere warmer than Norfolk. Break the bulb into cloves just before planting and use the fattest ones. On clay, the risk is rot, not cold. So draw up a low ridge of soil, or dig a shallow trench and fill it with a mix of grit and compost, and plant into that. Each clove goes in pointed end up, with its tip just below the surface. Space them fifteen centimetres apart in rows about thirty centimetres apart. Birds love pulling them straight back out, so lay a strip of fleece or netting over them for the first couple of weeks until the roots take hold.

The Lesson: Some things only become themselves after a hard winter. The cold is not in the way of the harvest. It is part of how it gets made.

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.