Sept. 14-20: In the garden, it’s time to…

Visit plant camp. Unless you've built an extension on your house since last spring, you're going to have to be selective about what actually returns to your living space. Pieces of all the coleus you've collected over the summer will look interesting in a small window box indoors, so you need to get started now. Get a clean container with good drainage and potting soil. Coleus roots happily without hormones, so break off a piece with a stem the size of a pencil and stick it right into the moistened soil. Water well with dilute worm compost. Compost will wilt and look ugly for a few days, then suddenly recover and stand back up. Let these root outdoors in a shady spot while you get the indoors ready for the influx.

Plant more fall vegetables. There's still time to plant root crops and greens from seed. This means lots of lettuce, arugula, spinach, Asian greens, carrots, beets, turnips, and radishes. Pull up some tomatoes if you need to make more room.

Do the fall lawn thing. That's cleaning up the leaves, continuing to mow at a height of 2 to 3 inches, cleaning up the bare patches, roughing up the soil, aerating the soil, overseeding, and keeping that moist in case it doesn't rain — all of those things that you have to do so that you can continue to mow for the rest of your life. And don't forget, you should be fertilizing now! (Fertilize too early and you get crazy growth and no reserves for spring; plant seeds too late, and the roots of the new grasses don't have enough oomph to make it through the winter.) If this is all too much for you, hire a lawn service. Their kids need to eat, too.

Sally McCabe is associate director of community education at the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society (phsonline.org) and a co-owner of Cobblestone Krautery (www.cobblestonekrautery.com).