Your garden’s best weekend

This long, holiday weekend in August is like manna from heaven for a gardener. We are on the mountain top, after all — the pinnacle of the season.

Your garden will never look as colourful and prosperous as it does now, so why wouldn’t you want to spend every waking hour in it?

In a general sense, nature now begins the long journey towards winter by first creating a multitude of flowers, then seed, and finally the changing of leaf colours as all perennial plants prepare for winter slumber and that state where your snow tires are now: dormant.

So, how to make your garden a long-weekend destination?

There is so much that you can do to engage the nature within you. Our recommended priority tasks:

1. Feed. All plants can use one more application of fertilizer, except for annuals like petunias and tomatoes which die with hard frost come fall and can be fertilized all season.

We use finished compost by making tea. Take an old pillowcase and fill one third of it with finished compost either from your composting unit or a bag of composted manure. Tie the top with twine. Drop it into a garbage pail full of water and let steep for 24 hours. The resulting dark mixture is perfect for everything that grows. Use within 48 hours to avoid undesirable smells.

Or you can use a synthetic fertilizer one more time. 2. Prune back spent July blossoms on perennials.

Shasta daisies, monarda, veronica, hollyhock, filipendula, some varieties of rudbeckia — you get the idea. When you remove the spent flower, you encourage the energy used to create seeds to be channelled to the creation of more flowers. You and the bees win. The plant does not mind either.

Make sure you are harvesting vegetables as they become ready. Tomatoes are ripening now to beat the band. Peppers, zucchinis, beans and many other fruiting plants produce at their best this time of year. Like perennials when you remove ripening fruit, you encourage it to produce more.

3. Cut flowers at their peak. Many of the flowers in your garden and containers look their best now. Cut some of them to enjoy indoors.

It is always best to cut flowers early in the morning when the natural sugars in the plant are highest. Take a bucket of fresh water out to the garden with you and plunge the cut end of the flower stem into the water.

When you get them indoors, recut the stems to suit the vase and use fresh water for your display. Refresh the water daily. Put the cut ends of the flowers in your composter.

4. Water — if you must. We are big fans of watering the garden well, but less frequently. We cannot think of one plant that needs water more than once a week, even in a heat wave, other than thirsty container-grown plants.

Allowing the root zone of your garden to dry — about eight-to-10 centimetres — between applications of water encourages roots to reach deep for moisture. Deeply rooted plants are drought resistant (which is one reason why we are not big fans of in ground irrigation systems: they train roots to be lazy).

When you do water, we recommend that you leave the sprinkler on for as long as it takes to seep about six centimetres deep. In the long run, you will save water and experience enhanced performance.

5. Hammock time. It is warm. Your garden and balcony look great. Get outside and enjoy it all while you can. Take the newspaper with you and enjoy each section to its fullest.

Bring a book or iPad.

John Graves Simcoe, after whom this holiday was named, had a summer cottage built in Toronto, at Bloor St. E. and the Don River, after he arrived in 1793. He called the getaway home Castle Frank after his little boy, Francis. Clearly, Upper Canada’s first lieutenant governor knew that life is not entirely about work, that there must be time to play.

We’d like to picture him working in his cottage garden, as his wife Elizabeth sketched the surrounding and flourishing greenery, on this same early August weekend more than 200 years ago.