Five overlooked garden jobs to finish before autumn and you must start now

As summer is coming to an end, it's officially time to start preparing our gardens for the autumn and winter months.

While all plants have different blooming times, most of them will either die or go into hibernation during the colder winter months. To help them thrive and have a healthy start to the new blooming season next spring, there are a few things you could do now to help prepare them for spring.

Gardening expert Michael, known online as 'The Mediterranean Gardener', shared his top five tasks for people to do in their gardens in the month of August to help keep them looking nice for autumn.

"Five essential jobs to keep your garden looking great in August," he said at the start of the video.

He then went on to list the five jobs to do now.

1. Remove weeds from lawn

"Now is a great time to remove weeds and prepare the soil for growing seed or laying tarp in September and October," Michael said for his first point.

While it's not needed to remove weeds from your lawn, many gardeners share the idea that it will make your lawn look 'less messy'.

According to The Royal Horticultural Society (RHS), the best way to do this is to use a hand fork or specialist weeding tool to dig out individual weeds. If part of your lawn is especially weedy, they recommend using a sharp spade to cut out and lift turf from the area.

2. Prune lavender

Next up, Michael said: "Prune lavender once the flowering is over. And while you're pruning, you may as well take some wood cuttings and turn the leftovers into fire lighters."

To prune lavender, trim back the flowered shoots and foliage by about a third, ensuring you cut above leaf nodes to encourage a compact shape. This helps the plant maintain its shape while also keeping it compact, and encourages healthy growth and abundant flowering.

Avoid cutting into the woody stems, as most lavender varieties won't regrow from that point.

3. Prune roses

"Prune rambling roses and tie them back into their supports," he said for this third point.

Rose pruning ensures that plants grow vigorously and flower well each year. If left, rambling roses can become a tangled mess of branches with very few flowers. Ramblers are routinely pruned in late summer, after their show of flowers and hips.

Just make sure your roses are in fact rambling roses, and not climbring roses, as these should be pruned in the winter time, usually between December and February.

4. Prune wisteria

Just like rambling roses, you should always make sure to prune wisteria during this time of year.

"And you've still got time to summer prune wisteria cut back leaves on grape vines to let the sun ripen the fruits," Michael said in his video.

According to the RHS, Wisteria needs regular pruning to keep its vigorous growth and overall size under control, but pruning will also improve the flowering display. This should be done twice a year, once at the start of the year, and the other in the summer time between July and August.

The removal of growth in summer allows better air circulation and more sunlight to reach the base of the young growths, encouraging better ripening of the wood and improving the chances of flower.

A bud is a small, undeveloped shoot that contains the potential for new growth. Buds are typically found on stems, where they can be apical (found at the tip) or axillary (found between leaf axils) and may develop into leaves, shoots or flower bud formation. This will help the plant grow more flowers.

5. Dehead border plants

"Finally, keep deadheading your border plants, unless you want to collect the seeds," Michael said for this final point.

This refers to removing and cutting off any dead flowers from your plants. This helps encouraging more blooms and can help prolong the flowering season for many border plants.