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Friday, August 26, 2016 7Brooklin Town Crier Blooming in Brooklin By Ken Brown Finally, rain! I'm standing in the rain, getting wet - and enjoying it. If I could dance like Gene Kelly, I'd do a version of "Singin' In The Rain." Finally, after too many weeks of hot, dry weather, Mother Nature blessed us with a real rain and rescued our gardens. How quickly the deadest brown lawns have sprung back to life. The amazing ability of many plants to adjust and survive inhospitable conditions and recover is another phenomenon that keeps me a humble and fascinated gardener. Now that the soil is reasonably moist and a fork will penetrate it, there are chores to do. The pile of Iris rhizomes is accumulating on my deck as I dig and divide those clumps that are getting too big for their space or are dying out in their centres. Sometimes I leave a healthy looking part of the clump in the ground. But since it's not usually where I want it, I dig the whole clump and choose a large healthy rhizome to replant. That invariably leaves me with surplus rhizomes which helps me keep friends. Plant seeds It's not too late to sprinkle a few short and cool season vegetable seeds. Lettuce varieties sown now will keep us in salad until the hardest of frosts. If you like colour in your salad, then radishes are great short season crops. Pak Choi and Kohl Rabi may also have time to produce a crop if sown now and the weather stays warm. If your lawn didn't surge back to life because it wasn't great before the drought, then now's the time to solve the problem. You could rip it all out and get prepared to have a great vegetable garden in that space next spring. A well laid out and tended vegetable garden makes for an interesting and productive front yard. Otherwise, start preparing for a new lawn. Perhaps yours is a mass of weeds. Then you could call it a wild flower garden. Or, eliminate those hardy species and plant healthy grass. Once weeds are gone, rototilling and levelling is the next step followed by a light spread of lawn fertilizer. Water it regularly until it is again covered with emerging weeds from the seeds the rototilling brought to the surface. Knock those down with horticultural vinegar and spread the grass seed without re-disturbing the soil. Keeping that grass seed moist is the real trick to success. A light watering morning and evening should do the trick before you decrease the frequency and increase the duration. This entices the roots deeper into the soil. You should have a good looking lawn by the end of September. Since gardening is often a balance between time and money, then take the money route and buy sod. It can be rolled out after the rototilling and levelling because few weed seeds will germinate under it. You can have your new lawn much earlier. But daily water for the first week is still the secret, using the same frequency and duration pattern as described. September doesn't mean the end of the gardening season. Far from it. Cooler weather means undertaking activities we didn't want to con- template in the summer heat. Create the new garden; rejuvenate the tired landscaping; transplant that poorly located shrub or plant. Gardening in the fall, one of my favourite times, is cool, pleasant and calm, without the frantic activity of spring.