Autumn equinox - bulb planting
I planted some bulbs earlier this month, but had a large batch to plant today. More narcissi, dwarf iris, crocus, puschkinia and hyacinth, have gone into pots. Each autumn I buy new bulbs, and pot them up, while the previous year's bulbs are planted in the garden somewhere.
It might be because I don't feed them enough when the leaves are dying back, or because I tend to stick the pots in a gloomy corner after flowering, or simply that they're in pots rather than in the ground, but I find often that the display from bulbs the second year isn't as impressive. Buying new stock each autumn should mean a reliable display in spring.
I think too that planting bulbs is one of those seasonal tasks important to gardening. There are other tasks that come a little earlier - like taking down the exhausted sweet peas or runner bean plants - that feel rather sad, a marker of the end of the summer. Planting spring bulbs is far more cheering.
Hyacinth bulbs are objects of beauty in themselves, even before they flower. They're all purple and shimmering and iridescent.
A surprisingly pleasant task today was cleaning up the old tulip bulbs. Tulips are I think my favourite bulb for spring, and I've got a few newly-bought ones ready to plant, later in the autumn (as of course later planting for tulips is recommended - it lessens the risk of virus problems). As well as the new bulbs, I had in the shed a few lots of grubby, dried-up tulip bulbs that flowered this year. After the leaves had died back, I needed the pots they were in, so took them out and left them to dry.
They were as I'd left them, and as today I wanted to get things a little more tidy and organised, I thought I should clean them and bag them up, labelled, ready for planting later. The heaps didn't look promising - dried-up roots, dry soil, and dark-brown flaking-looking things.
Pulling off the dried-up parts and the old roots revealed underneath some healthy bulbs, shiny and plump and a lovely russet brown, just as they look when you buy them. It was a very satisfying task, to rescue these promising-looking things from all the debris. Many of the bulbs looked too small to flower next spring, but there were a few in each batch that seemed big enough.
Having thought I'd got all organised for tulip planting, I realise I might need to now buy some new large plant pots to put them in. Though after my enthusiastic bulb potting-up session and the number of pots lined up as a result, I'm in danger of having so many pots of bulbs that walking around the garden is impossible without constantly kicking them over.
posted - Sunday, September 23, 2007
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