Taken from Eclectic Gardener @ www.teachinggarden.org
Written by Alan Hickman

An incident at the Brampton Fall Fair last Saturday reminded me of the importance of keeping one’s mind on the job.
The heavy horse pull is a popular event at the fair. Pairs of draught horses compete in a series of pulls to see which team can drag the heaviest load over a distance of 14 feet. In this case, the load was a steel sled stacked with 250 pound concrete blocks. In the final round, all the available blocks had been loaded and it was only by adding the weight of six large men that the teams reached their limits.
Just as the third team to pull got the sled moving, there was a loud crack and a whiffletree - part of the system of crossbars and links which connect a horse’s harness to the load - broke loose. The shaft snapped back, hit the horse’s rump and scared the daylights out of the poor creature which promptly bolted.
Now, more than a ton of horse-flesh, going at full gallop with nothing to stop it, is a sight to behold. As the animal flew past, with the remains of the tree banging along behind, I was imagining an armoured knight on its back with a lance. What a terrifying experience it must have been for medieval soldiers on a battlefield to face a hundred knights on chargers thundering towards them. Back in reality, the panicked horse looped around to where the trucks were parked and finally came to a stop beside its own trailer.
When the excitement had died down, the horse had only sustained a few superficial cuts from the broken hitch and a couple of vehicles were a bit the worse for wear, but no serious damage was done. After taking a few minutes to cool off, the horse was re-hitched and the team went on to win the event.
I’d been photographing the competition, and actually happened to push the button just a moment after the gear broke, but - and this is where keeping your mind on the job comes in - as the horse fled, I was so taken up by what was happening I forgot to snap any pictures. I’m just standing there with a thousand dollars of camera round my neck and an open mouth!
Although weeds sometimes seem to come at a gallop, things don’t usually move so fast in the garden. Despite the more sedate pace, though, people still forget to pay attention to the job. At this time of year, many people just watch the trees change colour, they pull up the frost-bitten petunias, and then they retreat for the winter.
By the early days of autumn, there still remains a couple of months of good gardening weather and much of the success of next year’s garden depends on how well the time is used between the start of school and the first snowfall.
If you don’t keep a running log of garden activities and what is doing well and what isn’t, now - while most of the plants are still green and in place - is a good time to write a review of the past growing season. Waiting ‘til January or next spring will be far too late; by then you’ll have forgotten most of what needed to be done and it’ll likely be too late to do anything about it anyway.
Be ruthless with things that didn’t do well. If a plant has been limping along all year, not quite dying but not thriving either, then get rid of it. A plant which is not growing well doesn’t like something about its environment. If you can’t bring yourself to toss a plant out, then give it to someone who might provide more agreeable conditions.
Evaluate the physical layout of the garden while it still looks and feels like a garden. Do you really want to keep maintaining all that lawn at the front of the house? There are few front yards which wouldn’t look ten times more interesting and attractive if the area devoted to flower beds was doubled.
Are the structural elements of the garden contributing everything that they could be? Might an arched or covered gate turn an otherwise nondescript back entrance into a significant feature? Are the ‘accessories’: the concrete frogs, the glass balls, the wind-chimes, (the plastic flamingos!) really contributing or are they just eye-catching clutter?
If the lawn has not done well, use the coming few weeks to rip up a section of it and fix the soil underneath. Dig out all the broken bricks and chunks of concrete and rubble and work lots of sand and compost into the top six or eight inches of soil. Amending the soil under just part of the lawn serves two purposes. First, it won’t break your back and, second, next summer you’ll be able to see how much difference your efforts have made.
Like a run-away horse, the next few weeks are going to fly by. Don’t just sit there and yawn - get out in the garden and do something.