Guides · Garden year
Your garden in September
4 of the 32 species in our plant database ask something of you in September. Everything else in the garden can be left alone, which is half of what a calendar is for.
Most monthly garden advice is written for nobody's garden. It says "prune shrubs" in a month when pruning half of them costs you next year's flowers. What follows is the September row of our own Garden year: each job attached to the plant that asks for it, from the same database the Dossier is built from.
September, plant by plant
| Plant | What September asks of it |
|---|---|
| Rosemary (Salvia rosmarinus) | Take cuttings now: they root in gritty compost in six weeks. |
| Japanese holly (Ilex crenata 'Dark Green') | Second and last clip. Nothing after the end of September. |
| Autumn raspberry (Rubus idaeus 'Zeva') | Pick every two days and water if the fortnight has been dry. |
| Strawberry (Fragaria × ananassa 'Mara des Bois') | Cut the runners off unless you want new plants. |
Every job here comes from that species' own entry in our database — the same rows that build the Garden year in a Dossier.
The whole-garden job
- 01The best planting month of the year: soil still warm, rain returning.
What not to do
- 01Do not tidy every seedhead away. They feed birds and they look right in frost.
- 02Do not leave a new planting unmulched into winter.
Next month: October. A Dossier includes all twelve rows, written on your plants — and on the first of each month we email you that month's three jobs.