What to do in your garden in October
And what not to do. Plus: bare root roses and a very good Swedish idea
There’s a lot to be getting on with in the garden, and I’m here to make it easy for you
This week we’ll be looking at:
Your garden job list for October
Even more importantly, what jobs I’m NOT doing in the garden
It’s time to start thinking about bare-root roses, and there’s exciting news about a hard-to-find rose
A reminder about bulb ordering and bulb bargains
A Swedish happy-making idea
A party right here on The Gardening Mind
Have you signed up yet? Free subscribers will be able to preview the first few items here, and paid subscribers will be able to see the full article every week, including: the to-do list, solutions to your gardening challenges, the small garden design course, planting ideas, gardeners’ question times, and more. Paid subscribers will also have exclusive access to the weekly Show Us Your Plots which is our regular get-together on the Chat, where we share ideas and solve problems throughout the week. A subscription works out at £1.30 per week if you sign up for the yearly plan - see it as a garden investment, as you’ll have loads of ideas by the end of each read. Plus, prices are going up soon so if you subscribe now, you’ll get the same annual price for a lifetime.
The next instalment will be in your inbox on Wednesday.
I’m honestly not wishing the time away, but as it’s very definitely Octobral outside in this little corner of Sussex, I reckon it’s time for the reappearance, due to actual popular demand, of the October issue of What To Do and What Not To Do in Your Garden This Month.
As ever, there also are some Not-To-Dos, not because I’m lazy, but because over the years I’ve come to the conclusion that many garden jobs are designed just to keep us busy. There are also a lot of traditional garden jobs - eg clearing up leaves from borders - that probably aren’t as appropriate now as they might have seemed to be twenty years ago, and yet which you’ll still see appearing in lists in traditional media.
I’m here to demystify things for you.
Another good Nordic way of approaching life
If you decided that you were following along with my ‘embracing autumn’ mindset here, I’d love to know how you’re getting on.
Have you noticed that the Nordic races have such good approaches to life, with some really excellent words to sum up good feels? You might be familiar with hygge1, friluftsliv2 and even maybe arbejdsglæde3, but your responses to last week’s post got me to thinking about the Swedish tradition of gökotta, which translates to ‘getting up early to listen to birdsong’.
Apparently, gökotta is all about that gentle magic of being up early, before the chaos and bustle of the day, immersing yourself in a bit or a lot of the natural world. It’s about the pleasure from the peaceful sounds of birdsong, and the daily therapy of natural light. I’m an early bird, but I’m also a fan of creature comforts, so please don’t for a minute imagine that I’m racing out there every morning. I often have to give myself a talking-to and a great big push to throw on a jumper and get outside with that first cup of tea.
But when I DO do it, my goodness it feels good.
It feels like gökotta is all about embracing those quiet early morning moments in nature, and I’m thinking it’s as good to embrace them now in October as it is in springtime. The mornings might be crisper, and the birdsong more sporadic than in May, but getting out there early and dare I say it, communing with nature in your own way, does get those happy-making chemicals going.
SO I’m going to be thinking GÖKOTTA - I really am - every time I go outside and approach each one of these to-dos on my list. Frankly, the sooner I get out there, the less opportunity I have to put things off, so early morning it is. I’m thinking about that crunch of leaves, the occasional early rays of the sun, and actually sometimes just doing nothing but sitting out there with that first cup of tea.4
Have you signed up for the Small Garden Design Course yet? It’s for paid subscribers, so if you’d like to take part, do sign up now before the subscription fee increases next week (once you sign up, the fee will never increase further for you).
You can read about this course here:
After downpour upon downpour, with cloudbursts on top of that, my lawn is very squelchy, so I’m going to be waiting for a drier period of weather to mow it. There’ll be more on what I do with autumn leaves next month, but for now I’m clearing a few from the grass as they’ll just go soggy there. Any leaves that fall on the beds, I’ll leave where they fall - again, I’ll be explaining why next month.
The climbing roses and some of the shrub roses - like peachy Rosa ‘The Lark Ascending’ above - have rocketed skywards again, so I do need to cut some of their stems back, about a third of the way down their length, and then tie them in before they snap in the wind. If you’re doing this, don’t prune them all the way down; think of it instead as just lightening the load on them to prevent them breaking and also to stop windrock, where the plant roots become unstable because they’ve been disturbed by the main plant being blown about.
I’ll do the same with the buddleia, but cutting the stems down by about a half, and then I’ll cut them back much harder around March next year.
There are some perennials that really have had their day and need to be chopped back, but others are looking good in their structure - eg some of the grasses and the Michaelmas Daisies - so I’m leaving them, partly for me, but mainly for shelter for wildlife.
There’s still time to order bulbs, and predictably there are some great tulip bargains if you hunt around. Remember, you absolutely don’t want to be planting your tulips until November at the earliest. You can find the easy bulb Cheat Sheet here: