Time for a garden tidy

I'm trying to pretend that autumn isn't happening. In my head I'm sitting at the patio table with a Pimms in hand flicking through the latest Gardeners' World, whereas in reality I'm peering out from the kitchen, watching the chickens shelter from the rain beyond the dogwood bushes whose leaves are slowly turning an autumnal shade of red.

So, in a brief few hours on sunshine yesterday, I started my garden tidy. Well, hubby started it while I sat at the patio table sowing some hardy annual seeds. As you can see, it was warm enough for a refreshing glass of shandy! These seed trays will go into the cold frame over winter and shouldn't need pricking out until early spring.

During a clearing of an untidy border, this little chap put in an appearance. My internet searches have identified him (or her?) as a common frog rather than a toad. But if any herpetologists out there know better, then I'm happy to be corrected.

As part of the tidy-up, I braved the tying-in of this years new tayberry shoots. It put me in mind of wrestling a particularly spiny snake. This lovely plant has grown three impressive new shoots during this year and these will fruit in 2013. I implemented my 'Loch Ness monster' formation again, which looks a little convoluted, but allows me to train 3m shoots onto a 1m length of fence. I also buried the end of the longest shoot to experiment with a bit of 'tip layering'. Hopefully I will have a baby plant to pass on to a deserving garden next year.