Hello friends, Gary here. This email is new, so a quick word about what it is.

There are two now. Monday morning is the proper one — the long piece, the one that takes me all week. This is the short one. It comes on Thursday evening, it runs to about two minutes, and it has a single job: Monday's letter is about what the garden has already done, and this one is about the weekend you are about to have.

That is the whole change. Nothing else moves.

It is going to rain tomorrow. A grey Friday, most of it gone by evening, and then the weekend comes in dry and bright — twenty degrees on Saturday, twenty-three by Sunday afternoon, down to eleven overnight.

On clay, that is the whole story.

Since June this garden has been a road. I have put my whole weight on a fork in the bottom bed and got about two inches, and the two inches came up in one piece, like a paving slab with roots in it. You cannot plant into that. You cannot move anything out of it either, which has been convenient, because on Monday I told you all the dahlias were coming out of the dry corner and I have not moved a single one.

The canes are still standing where I put them. The labels are still on. Cody asked me on Tuesday what they were for, and I gave him a much longer answer than the question needed.

Friday's rain changes it. Clay after rain passes through a narrow window: damp enough that a fork goes in, dry enough that it does not smear and glaze and set like pottery. Too wet and you do more harm than good — if it is coming up on your boots in clods, walk away and put the kettle on. Saturday morning, after a night of drying, is usually about right.

That window will be open for two days. By Tuesday we are back into rain and the ground goes heavy again.

So do not spend it tidying. The tidying will still be there in November. It is always still there in November. Warm soil and workable soil arriving on the same weekend is the thing that will not wait.

Whatever you have been meaning to move, this is the weekend.

Garden To-Do’s

1. Move the one plant you already know is in the wrong place. Not a project — one plant. Water it well tonight or first thing Friday so the rootball holds together, then lift it on Saturday once the surface has dried off. Take a wider circle than feels necessary, get underneath it rather than levering from the side, and get it back in the ground the same day at the same depth. Water it in properly even though the soil is damp; that is what settles the soil around the roots, not the moisture.

2. Take cuttings of the tender things while there is still growth on them. Pelargoniums, salvias, penstemons, fuchsias — anything you would be sorry to lose to the first hard frost. Non-flowering shoots, about four inches, cut just below a leaf joint, lower leaves stripped off, three or four round the edge of a pot of gritty compost. On a bright windowsill they will root in a few weeks. Free plants, and insurance against a winter you cannot forecast.

3. Overseed the bare patches in the lawn. This is the best fortnight of the year for it — warm soil, reliable moisture, and the weed seeds mostly gone quiet. Rake each bare patch hard enough to break the surface properly, scatter the seed, press it down with your foot, and put something over it to keep the birds off for a fortnight. It will knit in before the cold arrives.

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.