Gardening Cuttings: Weekend work

BLIGHT and rust are more of a problem than usual this year, the plants affected, perhaps, by an unusually cool and damp summer. Living in the West Country, I am used to seeing blight on the potatoes, but this year it has affected the tomatoes as well. And the cleomes, which were supposed to fill the front border with colour in late summer, are shuddering with rust. They have been drenched with Tumbleblite (Murphy).

Trim off the tired flowerheads of Stachys lanata and cut back the faded flowerheads of alchemilla before it starts seeding everywhere. Geranium psilostemon seems finally to have come to the end of its flowering. Trim the flower stems back to the base of the plant. Some plants set seed in long, thin cranesbill capsules. Sow the seeds in a pot in the cold frame where they can overwinter.

Indoor cyclamen that have spent the summer resting in their pots can be tempted into growth again. Knock the corms and old soil out of the pots, clean up the corms by removing old leaves and roots and, provided they seem healthy, pot them up in fresh compost, leaving the top of the corm just exposed. Keep watered and look for flowers in September.

Where raspberries have finished fruiting, cut the old canes to the ground and tie in the new shoots, spacing them roughly 6in apart on the wires. Cut out any thin or scraggy canes. Clean up strawberry beds by weeding them and nipping out any runners that you do not need. Shear off old leaves from the strawberry plants.

Take tip (semi-ripe) cuttings of geraniums and fuchsias, using non-flowering growths at the ends of the stems. Take cuttings 3-6in long and trim off the lower leaves, leaving only a topknot at the end. Trim the cuttings just below a leaf joint, stick them round the edge of a 5in pot filled with compost, and water them well. Geranium cuttings should not be covered. Other cuttings root best if the entire pot is covered in a plastic bag. Pot the cuttings individually when growth indicates that they have rooted.

This system can be used for a wide variety of common garden shrubs such as berberis, deciduous cotoneaster, daphne, hebe, lavender, mahonia, philadelphus and viburnum.