Hello friends, Gary here.

Today went sideways at about nine o'clock and stayed that way. Nothing at work went to plan, and I spent the whole day dealing with whatever landed in front of me instead of anything I had actually decided to do. You will know the kind of day. By four o'clock I could not have told you what I had achieved, only what I had reacted to.

Then Chloe, Olivia and I went to a high school open day, because next September Olivia starts high school, and somebody seems to have moved next September a great deal closer than it was in the spring.

The school's values are Kindness, Effort and Self-Discipline. They have stayed with me all evening. Partly that is because I agree with every one of them, and partly because I spent the drive home quietly marking myself against them. Kindness, I would like to think, most days. Effort, today, without question. Self-discipline is where it gets uncomfortable for a man who recently found an entire notebook of jobs in his own shed that he had written down and never done.

In my defence, on Monday I asked you to go out at six and look west, and I did it on Wednesday. By my standards that counts as prompt.

The weekend is dry again, the third in a row. Around twenty-one degrees on Friday, a little cooler at eighteen or nineteen through Saturday and Sunday, and down to about nine at night.

When I wrote this weekend's jobs, they lined up with those three words better than I could have planned. One of them is simple hard work. One is a small kindness to plants that will be short of light all winter. And one is almost entirely about holding back.

I did not plan it that way. I am taking the credit anyway.

Three words for a school full of eleven-year-olds. They will do for a garden in October too.

Garden To-Do’s

1. Spike the lawn, but take the soil out rather than pushing it aside. All summer a clay lawn gets walked on, played on and baked, and by October the top few inches are packed so tight that rain sits on the surface instead of going down. Aerating opens it back up, but on clay the tool matters. A garden fork or a solid spike pushes the soil sideways and squeezes the walls of each hole even tighter. A hollow-tine aerator pulls out a little plug of soil instead, leaving a proper channel behind. You can hire one, or buy a hand version for not much more than a decent fork. Work across the worst areas first: the route to the shed, the goalmouth, wherever the washing line stands. Go in about eight to ten centimetres deep, roughly fifteen centimetres apart. Do the trowel test first, though. After a dry fortnight the ground may be too hard to take a tine, and if it won't go in easily, leave it until after the next good rain. Once the holes are made, brush sharp sand or a sandy top dressing across the surface so it falls into them and keeps them open through the winter. Then leave the cores where they are to break down, or sweep them up if they bother you.

The Lesson: Heavy ground isn't short of goodness. It's short of air, and sometimes the most useful thing we can do is make a space and leave it empty.

2. Clean the greenhouse glass before the light starts running out. From now until February, every plant under glass is rationed on light, and a summer's worth of dust, pollen, green algae and leftover shade paint can steal a surprising amount of what little there is. A dry, mild weekend like this one is the time to do it. Carry the plants outside for the day; with nights around nine degrees they'll come to no harm in the sun. Wash the glass inside and out with warm water and a little washing-up liquid or a horticultural disinfectant, working from the top down. Don't skip the overlaps where one pane sits on another, because that's where the green builds up and the pests settle in for winter. A thin plant label slid along the gap will lift it out. Wipe down the staging and the frames while you're in there, sweep the floor, and let it all dry with the door open before anything goes back in.

The Lesson: In the dark months the job isn't adding anything. It's getting out of the way of the little that's arriving.

3. Sow sweet peas now for flowers next June. An October sowing gives you plants that flower earlier, grow stronger and stand up better to a dry summer than anything sown in spring. All of that comes from the roots they make over the winter. Sweet peas send a long root straight down before they put on much top growth, so give them depth: root trainers, deep pots, or the cardboard tubes from the middle of the kitchen roll packed into a tray. Sow two seeds per cell, about two centimetres deep, in ordinary multipurpose compost, and water once. Then put them somewhere cold: an unheated greenhouse, a cold frame, or a sheltered spot by the back door. The cold is what keeps them short and sturdy, and warmth only makes them leggy. Mice love the seed, so cover the tray until they come up. When each plant has three or four pairs of leaves, pinch out the growing tip above a leaf joint. It'll bush out from below, and you'll have twice the stems by spring.

The Lesson: Give a thing depth before you ask it for height. The flowering in June is decided in a cold frame in January that nobody bothers to visit.

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.