What to do in your garden borders now... key jobs for autumn (fall) and spring

Autumn or fall and spring are the two best times to re-evaluate your border and decide what you need to do so that it can look really brilliant next summer. The three main jobs to think about are planting plants, moving plants and lifting and dividing established perennials. It's Alexandra here from the Middlesized Garden YouTube channel and blog and I went to talk to Steve Edney and Louise Dowell at the No Name Nursery in Kent to get their expert tips on what to do in your border Steve and Louise grow the plants actually at the No Name Nursery and they also use the long border as a way of experimenting to see how certain plants look in real gardens and then they sell the plants at plant fairs around the southeast of England and Steve's also an award-winning head gardener and a garden consultant. So the first question I ask them is do you clear your border away in autumn stroke fall or in the spring? I know that people traditionally used to cut everything back and we have a tidy up for the winter. Now that horrible term putting the garden to bed. No absolutely not. Wildlife, insects, invertebrates, mammals you know small voles and shrews and field mice it's lovely to walk past the border and you don't notice the comings and goings of wildlife and unless you leave things be and then really observe things as you're traveling around your own garden. The other thing I think I definitely notice is when we're here and it's all died down before just kind of that late period before it gets cut when it's all really dry and you you can stand here you can actually hear things kind of rustling around in here. But an important thing during the winter is if you tidy up a border that's 100 meters long and six meters deep in the autumn there's going to be a mass of plant material because everything is still often quite green and there's still a lot of material there to tidy up and take away and compost. If you wait until the end of the winter nature has done some of the work for you, animals have done some of the work for you, birds and insects have done some of the work for you. So actually clearing the border can often just be a case of brushing your hand over the top of a perennial and knocking the stems which just snap off against the ground with the new emerging foliage and there is far less material to clear away making your job so much easier and a bit of a pleasure. And of course we can shred it and it's dry enough to to put it straight through the shredder. We put it straight through the shredder and we mulch straight back into the into the border with it. I think they both agree that clearing your border in the spring is much less work, so let's get on to the job of moving plants, planting plants and lifting and dividing plants. There are basically two reasons why plants need moving, one they're in the wrong place because they won't thrive there and two they're in the wrong place because actually they don't look good there. I don't know about you but all summer I've been staring at that, it's a wonderful grass Poa libellardii but it's a wonderful plant in the wrong place. It's too close to the other grass that's next to it. Visually the composition is wrong and so it's absolutely detracting from the beauty of that other plant and it's also hiding a couple of really other wonderful plants and on the front edge of a bed or a border you want plants that are going to work really hard. You can forgive plants that have a shorter flowering season that are deeper into your border because you can build communities together where you've got things that will succeed each other, but your front edge actually is quite critical. It needs to be reasonably neat and it needs to be long flowering. I asked Steve whether it was better to move plants in the spring or in the autumn stroke fall and he said it depends on the plant and you can check online when you're trying to move a particular plant as to what the best time of year to move that plant is, but most professional gardeners have to keep up their work throughout the year and they often tell me that they'll move plants when they've got time to move plants, so there is some flexibility in that advice. The Poa libellardii really should be a plant to move in the spring but sometimes, like the great Christopher Lloyd said, the right time to do it is when you've got time. The thing about winter moving plants is you don't want to move plants during frosty or frozen ground conditions because what you don't want to do is turn the frost into the soil while you're digging and lock it into the ground all winter. It's quite good for the novice or beginner gardener to move plants in the autumn or in the spring. Autumn while you can still see where it is and the border still looks quite full so you can actively see where you're moving plants and in the spring because you can see that young signs of growth so again it's a visual thing so you can see where everything is. In the middle of winter it's much harder, you really need to have a good eye and have a bit of experience before you jump into a border in the middle of winter because you can end up standing on dormant buds of plants so there's lots of perennials. Baptisia is a good example of this that have very strong dormant buds that are compressed leaves stems and flowers all in the bud together now if you squash that you've ruined next summer's flowers and you've also set the plant back quite away. I also ask them whether all plants can be moved and Steve's advice is that if you've got a woody plant like shrubs or roses then he thinks it'll be successful if you move them if they've been there for less than five years but if a plant like that has been in your garden for more than five years the chances of it re-establishing well after it's moved are much less. This answers a question I have because in fact I've got two roses that I think are far too near the front of my border and ideally I'd like to move them but they've been there for about eight or nine years so I think I will have to replace them rather than move them. I asked Steve for some good practical tips on moving plants so with moving perennials I would say the best thing is to make sure you've prepped the ground where they're going to be moved to if you're moving perennials cut them back by two thirds and whether you're lifting and dividing plants planting new plants or moving plants the way you actually plant them makes a big difference to their success so I asked Steve to share his professional secrets with us before you carry out the the simple act of planting something. There are things to consider and I think the two most important things that people often in a rush to get plants in the ground forget or don't pay enough consideration to are do you know what soil you've got I mean you could you could go as deep as you know ideally what pH you've got because you know some plants will like alkalinity some plants plants will like acidity in their soil so if you plant a rhododendron on chalk for instance it doesn't matter how well you plant it that is a dead plant waiting to happen and so knowing your soil knowing its structure and its composition and then knowing the kind of plants that will grow in that those conditions is is actually incredibly important and then knowing what plant you've got is it a sun lover is it a shade lover is it tolerant of dry conditions does it want damp conditions is it a good all-rounder some plants are very forgiving and they're very adaptable other plants want very specific conditions and so those two questions should be the first thing you're asking yourself some people say just dig a hole the size of the roots that's generally the no dig people and some people say dig a hole twice the size of the roots where do you stand on that yeah and this is an ongoing conversation i would prepare something twice the size if not preparing actually a slightly larger area because often you're not planting one you're planting three and so i wouldn't think of them in isolation i might dig a small space over and incorporate some organic matter for instance into the soil if you've got a very heavy clay soil actually you know trying to turn over and improve a larger area is really difficult and you're often growing on that clay not really in it so mounding up lots of organic matter to improve just a little bit on the surface and almost not really digging far into the clay is probably the best option if you've got light sandy or silty loam then actually digging in is easy you know it's it's not difficult work it's not backbreaking work you have to remember that because we're here in east kent and we're high light levels low rainfall we've adapted our planting techniques based to our location and every gardener should be thinking a little bit about that maybe looking at what's going on with other gardeners in their location how they're gardening what have been their successes and failures and listening to other gardeners in their local area about their techniques and what they've been successful with not it's not a one size fits all rule do you add fertilizer at any either in the planting hole or later on when you're planting for us that's a no i'm not necessarily in the no dig camp but i am in the no need for fertilizing you know if you're looking after your soil and you're treating it like the living organism that it is you're mulching and you're composting and you're improving its fertility naturally so we we never add artificial fertilizers do you water before planting after planting during planting we're just reaching the six week point now which is really unusual for the autumn for us where we've had no rain what we do is where it's so hot and dry and normally we'd expect it to be damp and cooler we are going to spots and we we pre-water a space normally the day before just so the soil is easier to work so we do that in preparation and we we clear a spot in the border where we know the plants want to go so all that work is done beforehand particularly if you've got bare root plants like roses or perennials or a tree we make sure all that groundwork is done before those plants arrive because we don't want them lingering and once we've carried out the planting that's when we'd water really well um we also as we're planting because we're in east kent not everyone would do this but because we're so hot and dry with a silty soil we actually water the bottom of the hole and allow a little bit of soil to seep back around but it's amazing how if you just plant something on in a dry location backfill immediately and then water the surface that it only penetrates about an inch it doesn't really get to the bottom of the roots so then you find your water and feeding roots start turning in the wrong way instead of diving down looking for moisture they head for the surface expecting to find it there so we'll often water the bottom of the planting hole as we're planting and that really does make a huge difference i mean not so much in the autumn but it makes a huge difference in the late spring when we're often adding annuals stitching them into the borders just before they're about to head into normally what is quite a hot and dry summer steve did add that nature is resilient so if you just plonk a plant in the ground dig a hole put it in the ground and hope for the best you've probably got about a 50 50 chance it'll be successful lifting and dividing established perennials is a job that's often recommended for spring or autumn stroke fall that's because a lot of plants such as day lilies or hardy geraniums spread and they either start to colonize too much of the border out competing the other plants or they get a sort of ring of flowers where the original root dies off in the middle so they have a sort of bald patch and the flowering isn't as good lifting and dividing a plant means digging it up breaking it into several pieces and then replanting those separate pieces back in the soil or putting them in pots to plant elsewhere i asked louise to show us how she does it as the weather here has been very dry louise and steve watered this area the day before they were going to lift and divide the plants and that makes the soil easier to work then she cut off about two thirds of the foliage because that makes it easier to see what you're doing but she leaves about a third on because it's easier to handle the plants that way she starts digging about three inches away from the main root of the plant and she digs around there with a spade slowly working everything out if a plant has been in your border for three years or more it may actually be very established and it's extremely difficult to dig out louise says it's almost impossible to dig it out without damaging some of the roots but try to avoid damaging any very woody roots as the plant begins to emerge she starts to knock off the extra soil with a fork because that makes it easier to see what you're doing and then when she finally pulls the plant out of the ground she knocks off even more soil with her hands how many pieces you divide it into depends really what you want to do with it if you just want to replant this clump looking healthier and flowering better in the same place then louise would suggest dividing this into four five or six pieces but if you want to create new plants you can divide it into even more pieces and as you start to work on the plant some small pieces will come away and you can put those in pots what louise tends to do is to put them in pots and grow them on for a few months before replanting them in the soil but you could try replanting them immediately they're just a little less likely to be successful louise uses the back-to-back two forks method for dividing plants and that is she puts a fork in really firmly into the middle of the clump and then she puts another fork in back to back with that fork and then she levers the two forks apart from the top the base of the forks is actually getting closer together you can also pull plants apart with your hands and you can also use a spade although you are a little bit more likely to damage emerging buds i've even known people separate a particularly stubborn clump of plants using a saw when you replant the plants replant them as soon as you can and of course using steve's invaluable advice on how to plant a plant if you want to find out more about how they created this border and pick up some amazing tips on how to choose and combine plants then don't miss the video at the end of bye