While you are reading this, feet up of a Saturday morning, I will be running. Even if you don’t get round to reading it until mid afternoon, I will be running. If you save SoS for bedtime reading, very rock and roll, I will still be running. In fact, if you prefer to read over your Sunday breakfast, yes, you guessed it, I will still be running! Well, I say running, by Sunday morning there’s likely to be more shuffling than running. This weekend I will join about 250 other idiots on a 100 mile foot race across the Oxfordshire and Berkshire countryside. I predict zero gardening will be done.

While I’m doing all that, you can do Six on Saturday. Six things, in the garden, on a Saturday. Could be anything, a flower, a pest, a disaster, a project, a job done, anything at all. Join in!

Here are my Six for this week.

1 – Echinops, spent bloom. Echinops go through as scruffy phase, after flowering, when the seeds burst forth untidily, blurring the spherical outline of the flower. Rotundity has been restored on this one, the birds have picked it clean of seed.

2 – Amelanchier x grandiflora ‘Robin Hill’. Chlorophyll has decided the party is over, has said his goodbyes and is just looking for his coat on the pile in the spare room. He might have one more drink for the road, but he’ll soon be gone, back for the Spring party.

3 – Rose ‘Danse de feu’. Not many flowers in my garden (well there’s the asters, of course), but this rose is still going strong, putting out new buds like it’s still June.

4 – Hosta. Some gardeners strive for years for this lacy look on their hostas, but never achieve it. I’m lucky with the conditions in my garden, just the right combination of slugs and snails, it never fails to impress. Look, you can see straight through the leaves! For the perfect minimalist look I just need to wait a matter of days and I’ll be left with just the skeleton, the stem and the veins.

5 – Geranium psilostemon. Not its first SoS rodeo, but included here again for the shocking pink joy of it, still flowering in abundance.

6 – Sedum ‘Autumn Joy’. The ubiquitous but rightly popular sedum, or hypertelephone as I believe there are to be known these days. They come readily from cuttings, I have several of these dotted about the garden now.

That’s your lot for this weekend, what are yours? If you would like to have a go, just publish your post and pop a link to it below in the comments. If you also mention my blog in yours that would be triffic. For more details you can read the brief participant guide.

If I survive the 100 miler, I’ll be back next weekend with another #SixOnSaturday.