October Gardening – What To Do in the Garden in October

“Listen! The wind is rising, and the air is wild with leaves. We have had our summer evenings, now for October eves.” Yes, there’s a distinct chill in the air, and the days are definitely getting shorter. October gardening focuses on tidying up, beginning to get the garden ready for Winter, and planning ahead for next Spring. Welcome to my October horticultural update, let’s take a look at what to do in the garden this month.

What to do in the garden in October

I’m going to split my October gardening guide into flowers, vegetables, jobs, and wildlife for easier reading. And I’ll be sharing some great gardening tips for your October garden too. At least ones I’ve tried, or I’m sure will work! Meantime, I hope you enjoy this short clip of birdsong in our garden, as much as Loki seems to 🙂

October garden flowers – flowers that bloom in October

Regular readers will know that our flower garden makes up the largest content of my garden posts, so I’m breaking them down further into annuals and perennials this month.

Annuals

Annuals grow from seed, flower, set seed, and then die, all within one year. First up is a lovely surprise, a late blooming, self-seeded sunflower by the pond. Hopefully, I’ll be able to save some seeds when she goes over, for planting next year. Another splash of yellow are the self-seeded wildflowers in one of our new flower beds.

October gardening sees rich colour from our Cornflowers*, helped by some daily dead heading to encourage new blooms. And the glorious purple Malvas (Mallows), which have self-seeded from the original plant we had some years ago. These are full of late summer nectar for the bees, as is the potted Senetti, although this plant won’t make it through the Winter.

Perennials

Perennial plants and shrubs are those that come back every year – they’re great value garden essentials, and we have a LOT of them. Strictly speaking, bulbs, corms, and tubers aren’t perennials, but they come back every year so I’m including them here. October gardening colour is epitomised by our dahlias, which are simply stunning this year. Our stalwart Penhill Watermelon with her huge blooms and my new Thomas Edison grown from a tuber this Spring look wonderful as single stems for displays in the house.

Slightly smaller but no less striking are the elegant Blue Bayou (although she’s more pinky purple than blue) and my all-time favourite, the little neon pink Roxy. Dahlias are amazing plants, coming in all shapes, colours, and sizes, happy in pots and the ground, flowering until the first frosts. Whatever your vibe, there’s a dahlia (or dahlias, because one is never enough) for you. Tip: received wisdom says you should lift and store your dahlias somewhere dry overwinter, but I simply cut ours back to ground level and mulch them heavily to hibernate in peace.

Salvias are great plants for borders, and can be very striking, as this month’s cover picture proves. Hardy, drought tolerant, and repeat flowering if lightly pruned, they’re brilliant for splashes of colour and pollinators love them too. Keep dead heading them to encourage fresh flowers and they should last until the first frosts. Tip: now is a good time to take cuttings to make new plants (once established, they make lovely presents too).

Other plants that are ripe for cuttings are pelargoniums and fuchsias. Take cuttings with good green growth and healthy stalks, and pop them into a pot of mixed compost and grit (for drainage). Then it’s just a case of keeping them warm and moist until they start growing. Both pelargoniums and fuchsias are tender plants and need some Winter protection. Our pelargoniums are already inside our conservatory, where we can keep harvesting their leaves for herb teas. The fuchsias will be going into the greenhouse as soon as I’ve finished clearing it out.

The Agastache (Giant Hyssop, related to Mint) with her aniseed-scented leaves and tall purple flower spikes is flowering again after some heavy deadheading. As are the pretty little Geranium Nodosum. These self-seeded freely from the parent plants by our gravel drive, so I dug them up and replanted them to fill in some gaps in the new garden beds.

My favourite Hydrangea by the front door is beginning to take on a mottled Autumnal look, slowly turning from brilliant white to a speckled pink. And the purple umbellifers on our rogue Joe Pye Weed are also very pretty, don’t you think?

Two new plants this year are the glorious dark purple Asters, which are smothered in bees all day long, and the Chinese Plumbago (Ceratostigma Willmottianum) with her cobalt blue flowers. Both should keep giving us jewel-bright blooms into November at least.

Lastly, here are some of our grasses, which are fabulous for giving a garden structure, as well as being very hardy and drought tolerant. On the left are a clump of tall, elegant, feathery grasses, whose labels are sadly long gone. Alan bought them as tiny plants back in 2020 and they’re clearly VERY happy by the pond. On the right we have some bulrushes in the pond, which we keep cutting back as they’re so vigorous. Fun fact: Flora calls them “poo-on-a-stick” – I can’t imagine why…

What to do in the vegetable garden in October

October jobs in your vegetable garden are about clearing and preparing your veg beds, although this time of year the soil is still warm. So, good seeds to plant in October are broad beans*, and early maincrop peas* for early crops the following year. Just be prepared to cover your new tender plants with cloches* or horticultural fleece* to protect them from frosts over Winter. Keep an eye out for any wild fungi too, like these growing underneath our old weeping pear tree. My Picture This plant i-d app (available on Apple and Google Play) says they may be toxic rather than edible though.

My neighbour donated me over 2kg of unripened green tomatoes, so I’ve made two batches of green tomato chutney – one with chillies, and a sweeter one with some quinces foraged on a walk. Speaking of tomatoes, I had a real surprise at the end of last month – just look what’s growing in one of our new flower beds. I’ve cut back surrounding plants to give the fruits some light, so we’ll see what happens.

We’ve had an absolute glut of pears from another of our fruit trees, the Poundstore sapling planted 9 years ago. As we can’t eat them all, I’ll be making some pear jam (as a change from plum jam) and some pear vodka (as a change from damson vodka) this month. Tip: pears will rot if left on the tree, you need to gently lift them and give them a little pull, or twist their stems a couple of times, and let them ripen in the fruit bowl.

And we also have a lot of unripe figs this year (none ready for harvesting, unlike this time last year). Apparently, you can make green fig jam but it involves repeatedly boiling the figs until there’s no more milky sap, which seems like a faff. I think I’ll leave them on the tree for now, and keep my fingers crossed…

Unripe fruit is not an issue on our prolific grapevine. It still blows my mind that we can grow so many grapes right here in our garden! I’ve tasted some of the fruits and they’re deliciously sweet, albeit with lots of pips. We don’t need to be greedy though, we’ll leave all the grapes for the birds as usual 🙂

While on the subject of fruit trees, October is a good time replace the grease bands* on our plum tree. It’s the best pest control to reduce the number of Winter moth caterpillars in Spring as the sticky bands stop the wingless females from climbing up tree trunks and laying eggs. We didn’t get many plums this year, but there’s nothing worse than biting into a juicy fruit and finding a little wriggling guest 🙁

October gardening jobs – things to do in your garden in October

First up on your October gardening to do list is looking at what plants need lifting, dividing, and moving. Many perennial plants need dividing every few years, partly because they get too overcrowded in their pots or borders, and partly to refresh and reinvigorate their roots. And I picked up a great potted plants tip from BBC Gardeners World programme recently. If you have plants whose roots are too close to the sides of the pots, take them out, split them in half, put them back-to-back into the pots again, topping up with fresh compost.

October in the garden is also a great time for harvesting seeds for new plants. Tip: choose a sunny day when they’re likely to be dry, cut or shake them carefully into paper envelopes (never plastic), label each envelope, and then store until you’re ready to sow them. I’ll be sowing our sweet peas* next month, based on how well it worked out last year.

One of Alan’s regular gardening chores is becoming less frequent now. Lawn care in October means only mowing our lawn and orchard once a fortnight on a high blade setting as the grass growth is slowing down. Before he cuts the grass, he’ll rake up all the fallen leaves from our deciduous trees, which we split between our compost pile and bins and biodegradable leaf sacks* to rot down into leaf mould. This is a brilliant – and free – soil conditioner for your garden plants. Tip: leave a few leaf piles in corners, for the hedgehogs to have somewhere to hibernate safely.

The thick layer of mulch (I love Strulch*) I added to all our pots and garden beds earlier this year (in an attempt to keep moisture in the soil during the heatwave), will also serve as insulation this Winter. So, no more mulching in October for me now. Other October gardening jobs to add to your to do list include pruning back lavender and verbena plants to new green growth once they’ve finished flowering, and planting up some pots for colourful Winter flowering displays. Check out this fab post from Claire for some more essential garden jobs for October too.

Lastly. at the beginning of the month I finished one of my favourite October gardening jobs – ordering my spring flowering bulbs for planting this Autumn. After which we can look forward to lots of lovely Spring colour (alliums, gladioli, narcissi, tulips) in our flower garden next year. Time to dig out my trusty long handled bulb planter*, and fire up our amazing back and neck massager as well…

Wildlife in your October garden

Alan is still keeping our bird feeders topped up with quality wild bird food* and high energy fat balls*, to build up our feathered friends for Winter. And not that you’d know it, but we cleared out loads of duckweed, pondweed, and algae from all our ponds last month, to give the water lilies and other oxygenating plants room, as well as the frogs, newts, and fish.

Over in one of our smaller ponds, I was about to clear some more duckweed when a little head popped up to see what I was doing – so lovely to see the frogs still like our smaller pond, as well as the large one.

October gardening – a summary

Phew, we’ve reached the end of my October gardening update, which is not quite as long as last month’s post, so thank you for reading! As mentioned earlier, the soil is still very warm at this time of year so, if you’re wondering if it’s too late to plant a garden in October, then please be assured that no, it’s most definitely not 🙂  And I do hope this blog post has given you some inspiration about what you can do in your own garden. I’ll leave you with this lovely Autumn quote that sums up October in the meantime:

“A brooding calm in all the air, A dreamy quiet everywhere… A golden glow to light the day That fades in purple mists away — This soothing calm, this presence bright, October’s sweet and mellow light.”

Did you enjoy your virtual visit our October garden? What will you be doing in your outside space this month? Which of my October gardening tips did you find the most useful?

* This post features affiliate links but all opinions are my own (see my Disclaimer).