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Published Aug 29, 2025 • 3 minute read
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After the heat of summer, many city gardens reach their colourful peak in September.Article content
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Make time to sit outside and savour these last limpid days of summer; it’s been too darn hot,
and in a month it’s going to start getting cold. But right now, it’s just right
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In many ways, September is the best time of year to tend a city garden. The heat of high summer has passed, and working outside is a pleasure again.
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The garden is at, or pretty near, its peak. And there are still lots of mild sunny days to go before the cold puts a stop to things. Your September chore list may require a bit more effort than it did last month, but it’s happy work.
You probably won’t need to water quite as much as you did when it was really hot, but unless we get a prolonged late-summer heat wave, your usual once-a-week-or-so soaking (about 25 mm per week) should be fine.
Feel free to give your garden and trees a drink with a garden wand in the mornings, if you like; just don’t overwet the leaves.
Start (or continue) to clean up dead or diseased plants and remove yellowed leaves. Most spring annuals will be over by now; dig or pull them out and put everything in the compost. As the month wears on, begin raking the lawn lightly as needed.
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I don’t know about you, but the combination of high temperatures and all the watering I’ve been doing has meant a bumper crop of weeds this year, growing straight up through the mulch. (I admit, it’s also been too hot to spend as much time as I’d like out there weeding, so they’ve gotten a bit ahead of me.)
I use a weed eater to get after the interlopers that grow up through cracks in the pavement; but if you have the energy, a winkler, hand fork or even a screwdriver produces more effective, albeit labour-intensive, results.
September is the best time to plant early spring-flowering bulbs like tulips, daffodils and crocus. If you’ve ordered from catalogues, the first of your shipments should be arriving now. Plant them as soon as possible after they arrive for best results.
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If you’ve ordered a lot of bulbs (I always go overboard every year), buy a box of bulb fertilizer and throw a handful into the hole before you put each bulb in place. (Bone or blood meal work well too.)
It’s also a great time to divide most large perennials, such as hostas, irises and daylilies. This is a great – not to mention free! – way to expand your collection.
Start by gently digging up the overgrown plant with a fork, trying to preserve as much of the root ball as possible. Then there are a couple of ways to divide them, depending on the type of plant.
With large clumps such as hostas, you can stick two forks back-to-back right down the middle of the plant and use brute strength (or a sharp knife) to pry it apart.
Daylilies and irises require slightly more precision treatment. After carefully digging them up, trim the top leaves to about 4-5”, cut away any dead parts, then divide them into smaller sections, ideally with three or four buds on each.
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Replant farther apart. (Iris rhizomes should be positioned right at the soil surface, with their roots draped on either side extending down into the soil.)
Many perennials actually do better when you plant them in late summer and early fall rather than in spring, as long as you give them enough time to get settled in and produce new roots before the first frost. (For Ottawa, that means early to mid-September, and pretty much any time in September for Toronto.)
Warm temperatures encourage growth and flowering, but in the fall the pressure’s off, so a new (or newly divided) plant can focus on developing a good strong root system and preparing itself for winter dormancy. And by next spring, it – and you – will be that much further ahead of the game.
Please feel free to write in with questions, to comment or to share your own city gardening adventures
with Martha. Write to her at marthasgarden07@gmail.com.
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