One of my biggest confusions when I started gardening was about mulching. I grasped that mulching my borders with a good thick layer of compost, especially home-brewed, would put goodness back into the soil, keep moisture in the ground and suppress weeds. My conflict was that I also loved the idea of self-seeding plants like foxgloves and nigella, whose bursting seedpods would drop their wares about the place and effortlessly (hah!) furnish me with a flower-packed garden. How could I mulch and not smother self-seeders trying to do their thing? Some might still come up, but I hated to take any chances.

The answer I eventually came to was mulching late and being selective about the seedlings I keep. I initially went overboard and let everything grow (“it could be a weed, but maybe it’s a rare orchid…”). Most of the self-seeders turned out to be hairy bittercress, creeping buttercup and poppies. It’s only time, and the fabulous Seed Site, that’s helped me recognise the good stuff. This year it’s been great to see self-seeding cerinthe — a truly beautiful, dusky blue-green annual — come up to join the other self-seeders like biennial wallflowers, nigella, nasturtiums, alchemilla mollis, verbascum, lychnis coronaria…and the superabundant aquilegia and foxgloves. I relocate or compost anything unwanted or in the wrong place, and I mulch around the keepers with compost now, when the soil is good and wet, to give the worms and the frost the whole winter to break it all up and pull it down below.

If you want to sort the weeds from the keepers, the Seed Site has an encyclopedic weeds section, with descriptions and pictures organised by flower colour. It does the same for hundreds of desirable plants and flowers, including popular favourites. Brilliant.

It’s incredibly satisfying to see autumn sown sweet peas soar into the sky as soon as early June, and I’ve tried to get organised every October for the last few years to start my seeds off in good time. During some of the televised coverage of Chelsea 2008, Derek Heathcote of Eagle Sweet Peas explained the best way to do autumn sowings. I was recording all the coverage at the time and am so glad I kept it for reference, because Derek’s method is fast and it works — no fiddly soaking or chitting of seeds, great germination rates, and very healthy specimens for planting out in spring. I’ve just discovered that his instructions are also on his website. They differ only slightly from what he said on TV, where he used cheap plastic drinking cups (with a drainage hole cut into the bottom) instead of grow tubes. Derek emphasises how important it is to get the new plants out into a cold greenhouse once they’ve germinated. They don’t need mollycoddling! I’ll be back to Derek’s website later — for cut sweet peas, he offers tips on how to get rid of the black pollen beetles that always hitch a ride onto the flowers and end up crawling about your kitchen table.