As well as picking the top of your crop, don’t forget about your roses. Make sure you deadhead them for a strong re-growth next season.
– Leave tomatoes on the plants until the weather turns, to allow them optimum time to ripen.
– Leave nets over brassicas to stop pigeons feasting on them.
– Reduce the watering and feeding of greenhouse plants.
– Continue to deadhead roses.
– Trim hornbeam, beech, Leyland cypress and thuja hedges, if you haven’t already done so.
– Take hardwood cuttings from roses, choosing healthy stems of the current season’s growth.
– Root cuttings of lavender directly into gritty soil outside or in a cold frame.
– Pick crops at their best including marrows, runner beans, ridge cucumbers, spinach, sweetcorn, beetroot and salads.
– Sow hardy annuals like calendula, godetia, larkspur and candytuft outside where you would like them to flower.
– Plant tubers of Anemone ‘De Caen’ and ‘Saint Brigid’ at intervals to extend their flowering next spring.
– Sow poppies where you want them to flower next year.
– Lift Lilium regale clumps and re-set, planting them about 15cm (6in) deep in well-drained soil improved with compost and grit.
– Give autumn green crops a light dressing of general fertiliser hoed into the soil around them.
Best of the Bunch – Japanese anemone
Don’t confuse the low-growing, brightly flowered anemones you find in late spring with Japanese anemones, which bloom from late summer until the first frosts of October.
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A. japonica (A. hybrida) stands 60-120cm (2-4ft) high, producing saucer-shaped flowers in white or pink with a central boss of golden stamens.
Good varieties include ‘Honorine Jobert’, a tough, late-flowering plant on strong stems carrying single white blooms, which flower for up to eight weeks and reach 100cm (3ft) in height, and ‘September charm’, a slightly smaller pink variety which reaches about 60cm (2ft) in height.
Japanese anemones will grow in any well-drained garden soil in sun or semi-shade. They look great in the autumn border alongside asters and chrysanthemums or can be used in front of shrub roses and large shrubs. In a small garden they make reliable back-of-the-border plants behind summer bedding, which can be removed when the anemones are ready to bloom.
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