Hardwood cuttings: the laziest propagation there is
This is the trick most people skip because it sounds technical, and it is genuinely the easiest thing in the garden. Once shrubs have dropped their leaves, cut pencil-thick lengths of this year's growth, roughly the length of your hand to your elbow. Cut straight across at the bottom, just below a bud, and at a slant at the top so you remember which way up it goes.
Push them two-thirds deep into a slit trench of gritty soil in a quiet corner, or into deep pots of free-draining compost against a sheltered wall. Then forget about them until next autumn. Dogwood, willow, currants, gooseberries, forsythia, philadelphus and many roses take this way with no heat, no propagator and no fuss. Expect some failures; that is why you take twice as many as you need.
Collect seed, and let the garden sow some for you
Dry seedheads left standing — nigella, poppies, honesty, aquilegia, hollyhocks, teasel — are free packets waiting to be tipped into an envelope. Do it on a dry day, label properly in pen, and store somewhere cool and dark. Hardy annuals can be scattered now where you want them, and they often come up stronger than spring-sown ones.
Also look down. Self-sown seedlings of foxglove, verbena, forget-me-not, aquilegia and feverfew are probably already dotted round your paths and gravel, in exactly the places you will later weed them out. Lift them carefully with a trowel, pot them on or move them to where you actually want them, and you have a drift by June.
