Garden tips for September

Fall Garden Tips

The fall garden tips for the month of September, the most beautiful of all. In the fall garden, a final fling of colour, saturated and intense, is in stark contrast to the mellow parchment shades of surrounding meadows.The hard light of summer is replaced by soft warm rays, and the low sun pulls and rakes shadows across the garden.

September also brings the first frosts, caught in the layers of flowers and foliage, so fall garden tips are based on this too. The effect can be magical on any English garden.Without doubt September’s floral stars are the asters, and the brightest star in the firmament is A. x frikartii ‘Mönch’, a hybrid of A. thomsonii and A. amellus. Its single large lavender blue flowers provide up to three months of display, and it associates effortlessly with many of the month’s other blooming beauties. Of these, I wouldn’t be without Anemone x hybrida ‘Honorine Jobert’, its silky white petals surround golden stamens, which in turn surround a green knob. Equally hard to resist are the sedums - the butterflies and hoverflies think so too - from fleshy stems and leaves, wide flat heads made up of a myriad of tiny stars persist until felled in spring.

FALL LAWNWORK IN THE GARDEN 

With up to 160,000 pairs of feet treading on the tiny grass plants, it is only with intensive fall maintenance that the lawns not only survive, but thrive here at Bodnant. Even in domestic gardens,
however, lawns will look better with some attention now. The first garden tip is to rake out the
build up of dead grass (thatch) that lies in the sward and collect it up. Next of our garden tips, we need to improve surface aeration and drainage using a mechanical spiker; however, on a domestic
scale, a border fork will be just as effective. Creating these slots will enable air to get in,
relieving compaction and improving drainage.

Here is another very useful garden tip. Every two to three years we use hollow spikes to remove cores of soil, and then the holes are filled by brushing in a top dressing of 60% sand and 40% loam.

PLANTING BULBS IN THE MEADOW

We start our bulb-planting campaign this month. Narcissus start forming roots earlier than most bulbs and so should be planted no later than September, but it can be physically difficult making planting holes, particularly if the summer was hot and dry. A solution that I find preferable is to pot up the bulbs into 9cm pots and place them into an open coldframe covered with 7cm of chipped bark.
Here they can remain until early spring, when with ease they can be lifted from the pots and planted into the short grass. If the ground is workable then plant them directly into the ground, making holes with a trowel.

Hope these fall garden tips will help you to maintain your garden at the best!