Time to start taking cuttings of tender container plants if you like to overwinter your own (plectranthus, shrubby salvias, pelargoniums, etc). Push them in around the side of small pots in which, once rooted, they can remain fairly dry over the winter and be potted on in spring.

Those who lust after green-baize lawns and use selective weedkillers should do so again now, while the ground is warm enough at night for the chemicals to be thoroughly effective; if you use herbicides, better to do so efficiently.

Start clipping evergreen hedges – yew, box, phillyrea, Osmanthus heterophyllus and holly. Hollies look infinitely better clipped with secateurs, which leave no chopped leaves.

Take a quick look at sprawling annuals – nasturtiums, petunias, helichrysum – and ask yourself if there is some little treasure buried under there that you forgot about. Save it.

Readers' queries

We have inherited a neglected, half-full compost bin with weeds growing out of the sides. It has not been looked after for three months. Can it be saved? Mrs T. Cooney, Whitstable

There is no such thing as an out-of-control compost bin, although those who have had the opportunity to hear the gruesome Anderton cabaret song about the compost heap so full of high-tech accelerants that it rears into life and tries to consume the human race in revenge may feel otherwise.

Gardeners who are serious about composting like to have three bins – one filling, one rotting and one ready to use. If the weeds coming out between the planks of your bin do not have troublesome roots – ground elder or couch grass – then just pull the tops off and stick them on top. Ideally, empty the bin entirely and fork the contents back in, shaken out, aerated and well-watered, to get things hot and steamy again. Then fill as normal.

If the offending weeds do have pernicious roots, spray the leaves with glyphosate to kill the roots, before emptying the bin, fishing out any lingering roots and putting it all back again.

Emptying a compost bin is a messy business and, in a small garden, it’s worth having a big, heavy-duty plastic sheet for the purpose.

A large patch of yellow loosestrife is choking everything else in a flower bed – how can I deal with it? Mrs E. Potter, Worcester

Yellow loosestrife (our native Lysimachia vulgaris, or sometimes its lookalike, the naturalised L. punctata) is a beautiful plant, no doubt, flowering over a very long season and spectacular in its way, but it does like to slide its fat roots under the surface, like rosebay willow herb, and invade other plants. Really, it’s a plant to put either in rough damp grass, or by water, or somewhere it can be corralled in its own patch.

For now, I would leave it well alone, but, in the autumn, chop round the main part of the clump, then use a hand fork to lift and remove the outlying roots, including those that have sneaked across the roots of other clumps. It will be fiddly, but nowhere near as difficult as getting out ground elder or enchanter’s nightshade. You could get rid of the lot.

stephen.anderton@thetimes.co.uk

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