Hello friends, Gary here.

Last Thursday I told you the ground would be soft and it was not, and on Monday I wrote you rather a lot of words about being wrong. So this evening I went out with a trowel before I wrote anything.

The line has moved. Not far — a hand's depth rather than a finger's — but it has moved, and it moved on three small ordinary rains rather than one dramatic one, which is exactly what I told you on Monday would have to happen and did not quite believe while I was typing it.

What I actually noticed, though, was not the soil. I went out at ten last night to shut the greenhouse door and the cold came at the backs of my hands before I got to it. Nothing dramatic. But it was the first evening this year that felt like it belonged to the other end of the calendar.

The weekend itself is kind. Friday and Saturday dry and bright, twenty-two or so by Saturday afternoon, Sunday warm with rain coming in late. Nights down to about ten.

Warm soil, cooling air. That gap is the whole opportunity.

Roots keep working while the soil holds above roughly ten degrees, and the top of the plant has more or less finished for the year. So anything that goes into the ground now spends the next two months doing nothing visible and everything useful — no leaves to feed, no flowers to hold up, nothing to do but anchor itself.

Which is why none of this weekend's jobs will look like anything by Sunday evening. A greenhouse watered in the morning instead of the evening. A list on a bit of paper. A border with bulbs under it and no sign of them.

That is not a reason to skip them. It is the reason they work.

Garden To-Do’s

1. Change how you water the greenhouse, not just how much. The plants in there are drinking less than they were a fortnight ago — shorter days, weaker light, cooler air — and if you carry on with the August routine you will be leaving water standing in compost that no longer wants it. That is half the problem. The other half is the evening. Warm damp air, a cold night, and by morning there is moisture sitting on every leaf and every pane, and that is the exact condition grey mould has been waiting all summer for. So water in the morning from now on, never at dusk. Water the compost and not the plant; a can with the rose off, down at the base. Open the door and the vents through the day even when it looks unnecessary, and shut them before the temperature drops in the evening. Then spend ten minutes picking off anything dead or dying — yellow lower leaves, spent flowers, the tomato foliage that has gone papery — because botrytis starts on dead tissue and moves into live tissue afterwards. Give what is left room to breathe. Air moving through a greenhouse in September is worth more than anything you can spray on later.

The Lesson: The habit outlives the conditions that made it sensible. What was care in July is neglect by the end of September, and nothing announces the changeover.

2. Make the list before you buy the plants. Take paper round the garden on Saturday morning while everything is still standing and still honest — the gap where something went over in July, the corner that flopped, the bed that has been beige since the middle of August. Write down what is actually there before you write down what you want. Then decide where things go while you are stood in front of the evidence, rather than in a garden centre in front of whatever is in flower on the trolley. Autumn is the better planting season on clay anyway: the soil is warm, the moisture is coming back, and a perennial planted now meets next summer with a root system already made instead of trying to build one in a drought. Check with a trowel before you plant into anything that has been baked, though. I would not raise it if I had not got it wrong a fortnight ago.

The Lesson: Decide while you can still see the evidence. A choice made in front of the thing itself is a different choice from one made in front of a photograph of it.

3. Get the spring bulbs in. Daffodils, crocus, scilla and hyacinths can all go in from now, and daffodils in particular do better for an early start — they are rooting long before you see anything. Tulips are the exception; leave those until November. Depth is about three times the height of the bulb, pointed end up, and on heavy ground a handful of grit under each one is worth the minute it takes, because bulbs rot in wet clay far more often than they fail in cold. In pots you can pack them much closer than in a border — almost touching — with the biggest bulbs deepest and the small ones above them. Buy more than feels sensible. I have never once stood in a March garden and thought there were too many.

The Lesson: Some work pays you back so far from when you did it that you will have forgotten doing it. Bury it anyway. March finds out.

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.