planting bulbs

Our 2023 – and 2024! garden: planting and transplanting

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This morning, before I intended to continue working on the trellis bed, I wanted to transplant those volunteer tomatoes into the old kitchen garden.

Yes, it’s September, and our average first frost date is the day after tomorrow, but if the frost holds off long enough, they just might have a chance!

It was also a good time to amend the bed the Irish Cobbler potatoes were in. After removing the remaining mulch and loosening the soil (and finding a few tiny potatoes that got missed!), I worked in a bag of cow manure. I also noticed a couple of spaces in the walls where the grass clippings used as chinking was gone, so I found some scrap pieces of wood to put over the gaps on the inside.

Once the bed was prepared, I went and dug up the volunteer tomatoes. I don’t even water that bed anymore, so the soil was very dry. None of it stuck to the roots at all! I laid them out gently on one of the baking sheets we use to transfer seedlings in and out while hardening them off. Those are so handy! We need more of them, but Costco no longer carries them. They are SO much more expensive, elsewhere!

Anyhow.

I had seen one volunteer tomato had died; all it’s leaves just shriveled up for some reason. I left that one, but I still ended up digging out 9 tomato plants! All but one of them are where we’d had Spoon tomatoes planted, 2 years ago. I kept track of the one that came up where cherry and grape tomatoes were planted last year, and the year before.

I’d already given the bed a fairly decent watering, but once I knew how many transplants I had, I dug a hole for each of them, then gave each hole a deep watering. As for the transplants themselves, I trimmed off the lowest leaves and buried the bare stems all the way to the first set of leaves.

I happened to have exactly the right number of plastic rings that had been used to protect the peppers, etc. in the wattle weave bed, so those got put around each tomato plant. These will not only protect them from overnight chills, but from rambunctious kittens, too!

At this point, my alarm went off, reminding me that the post office was open again after lunch. I have a subscription on lysine for the outside cats, and it was in. When I got there, however, I had a pleasant surprise.

My saffron crocus bulbs were in! When I checked the tracking, it was telling me the package would arrive on Monday, so this was a pleasant surprise.

It also changed my plans for after I finished with the tomatoes.

Since we had to pull up all the Roma tomatoes, I had a lot of bamboo stakes available. I pushed in a pair of them inside each plastic ring. These will keep the wind from blowing them away – and the cats from knocking them about – and if the weather holds long enough for them to survive, they will be supports for the tomato plants, too.

I also had the soaker hose that had been used on the Roma tomato bed. It’s pretty long, though, so I was able to run it back and forth and around every plastic ring, using tent pegs to hold it in place on the curves.

Last of all, the mulch got returned.

It’s ridiculously late to be transplanting tomatoes in our area, but I wanted to give them a chance!

That done, I could move on to the saffron crocuses, which needed to be planted right away.

These are actually a zone 4 plant, and we’re zone 3, so they went into the same protected area we have our zone 4 apple tree, and where the girls planted tulips. This area has a mishmash of wire surrounding it, to protect them from the deer.

There are 20 bulbs in the package, and the need to be planted 4 to 8 inches deep, and 3 inches apart. I was originally intending to plant them in a 4 x 5 bulb block, in an area I was pretty sure there were no tulips growing, but after poking around with a garden fork, that went out the window pretty fast. The area is so full of large roots!

I ended up being able to start a longer trench, so I went with 2 rows of 10 bulbs, instead.

The instructions specifically said to NOT amend the soil with manure of fertilizer, to water them when planted, but to not water them again unless it was drought conditions.

In clearing out the soil, so many weed roots were removed that there was hardly any soil left. I would have to get soil from the remains of the truck load of garden soil in the outer yard we bought a couple of years ago.

After removing the top 4 inches of weed roots and dirt, I loosened the bottom with a cultivator tool, then gave the trench a very deep watering. Then I loosened the soil some more, tried to level it off a bit, and watered it some more!

After that, I went and sifted some garden soil into the wheel barrow to fill the trench, before getting the bulbs.

I did not expect them to be so…

…hairy.

The bulbs got laid out in two rows, 3 inches apart, then buried. I ended up needing to get a second small load of soil to cover them well. They got about 6 inches of soil, maybe a bit more, on top. It will, however settle over time. Compaction is another concern. I wanted to give them a final watering, but not with out a mulch, first!

Thankfully, we still have lots of grass clippings handy for mulch!

Once a thick layer was in place, I gave it another deep watering. I wanted that new soil, which was quite dry, to be moistened. The mulch is great for keeping the soil below moist, but if the clippings are very dry, they actually prevent moisture from getting through. The top will get wet, but the bottom – and the soil below – says dry. Kinda like how thatch works. So I made sure the mulch itself was very wet, all the way through, so that the water could moisten the soil, too.

Given the temperatures we can hit over the winter, these will need more protection before the ground freezes, as well the apple tree. It’s already sheltered and protected from the north and, now that the dead and dying trees are cut away, it gets full sunlight and warmth. Still, extra protection will be good! When the leaves fall, we can use that to mulch the entire area. In the spring, though, the mulch of the crocuses will need to be pushed aside, leaving only a light layer to protect the soil. The alternative would have been to plant them in pots and bring them in every winter, and frankly, I have no interest in doing that. It’s hard enough to protect our house plants from the cats! They’d just love some big pots of soil to dig in. 😄

Once the mulch was in place, I spread out the soil that had been removed as evenly as I could, and that was it.

We now have tomatoes transplanted that, if they survive, will be for this year, and bulbs planted for next year! These crocuses boom in the fall, so it will be quite some time before we know we will have any saffron to harvest.

I’m pretty excited to find out.

From the Vesey’s website:

Bulbs typically triple their flower output year over year. A package of 20 bulbs should produce enough saffron in the first season for the average family to enjoy sparingly.

Triple their output every year? That would be amazing!

But first, they have to survive our winters!

The Re-Farmer

Fall planting: the last of the flowers, plus other progress

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Along with the three types of garlic that came in, my daughters’ flower bulbs arrived.

The tulip collection included 10 bulbs each of Orca, Pinksize and Brownie, and 8 bulbs each of Black Hero, Pamplona and Vanilla Coup. There was also 6 bulbs of Gardenia Daffodil.

So while I was having fun working in the soft soil, planting garlic, the girls did the hard work of digging holes for bulbs in hard soil, and between roots!

They did not take pictures of the process, unfortunately.

The tulips were planted not far from where they’d planted the Bulls Eye tulips that came in earlier. This area was selected for its combination of sunlight and drainage, and because they’re not supposed to be watered, and this is not an area where they might accidentally get watered along with something else.

The tulips need to be planted up to 12 inches deep, if we want them coming back year after year, but that depth includes the depth of any mulch. So they planted the 50+ bulbs at 6 inches, adding a 6 inch leaf mulch. Leaves, however, crumble and settle quite a bit, plus the wind was threatening to blow it way, so they also wet down some peat, which we still have lots of, and added that to the top.

The Gardenia Daffodil had different requirements, so it was planted with the Eye of the Tiger irises planted along one side of the old kitchen garden.

When we are next able to, we’re thinking of picking up a couple of bags of soil to scatter on top of the mulch. The soil under the mulch in the old kitchen garden is much improved from before, but the straw itself, and even the grass clippings, aren’t breaking down very quickly, making it not at all conducive to planting in it. It’s all just too stringy! :-D And now there’s the excess flax straw from inside the cat shelter. Adding some soil and peat, as well as moisture, for the microbes and worms to do their stuff should help it break down faster.

We also got a couple other things off the to-do list today.

Now that the soil around the support post has had a few days to settle (and get stomped down some more, every now and then), our new bird feeder is now hung up. Hopefully, this less decorative design will not get flung around in the wind as much as the church and barn shaped ones were, and with the support now buried in the ground like a fence post, we don’t have to worry about it being knocked over any more!

I also had a chance to work on the grapes, while the girls were still digging holes for tulips.

The first thing that needed to be done was prune them. I hope I did it right. From what I’ve read, they should be pruned above the second bud from the ground, as grapes will be produced on first year vines. The problem was, I couldn’t see any buds at all! So I tried to err on the side of caution.

I had to move the trellis supports so I could get behind to harvest the grapes. Today, I finally set them into the ground in their new locations, so we can squeeze behind them again, if necessary. On the right is a long piece of rebar, but the white support on the left is actually two plastic tubes on a shorter piece of rebar. The bar wasn’t long enough to hold the trellis wire, but it is long enough to support the plastic tube. I had to lift off the piece that was woven into the wire mesh, then reset the position of the other two pieces.

When I set this up as a makeshift trellis, I was able to bang the rebar into the ground with a piece of broken brick I’d found while cleaning up around the storage house. I tried that again, but it broke. So I dug around in the sun room, among the things we’d found in there while cleaning it up. There was an old hammer with a ball peen on one side, and a heavy flat head on the other. Much heavier than a regular hammer. For the long piece of rebar, I had to stand on the stairs to reach the top and start hammering it in.

The head fell off the hammer.

It turned out the handle was rotted out at the head!

Thankfully, I still had the new handle I’d found while cleaning up the old basement. I’d intended it for something else, but it didn’t fit right, so I’d left it for later.

Now, I’m glad it didn’t fit the other thing I’d meant it for!

Mind you, it didn’t fit the head of this hammer, either, but I was able to shave the corners of the top, and got it on. I was able to finish the job!

After hammering the rebar supports into the ground and getting the plastic tube in the wire mesh back in place, I was able to use foam covered garden wires a darling friend found for me, to tie the pruned vines to the mesh. Then I used one of the bamboo poles that we’d used in the squash beds as a support for the top. With the grapes growing so well this past summer, I was able to see the weight of the vines were pulling the wire mesh downwards, so this should add some extra support.

Now, all they need is for some mulch to be added to protect them from the winter’s cold. From what I’ve found out about growing grapes in our zone is that they should be just fine with snow as insulation; the vine would be laid down on the ground to be covered. Planted against the storage house like this, that doesn’t really work out, so mulch it is!

We now have all the flower bulbs we ordered planted – 200 grape hyacinth, 100 snow crocuses, irises, gladiolas, and almost 70 tulips – plus the garlic.

That’s it for fall planting this year.

Now, we need to assess how our vegetable gardening went, and decide what we want to plant next year! :-)

The Re-Farmer

Fall planting; Bulls Eye Tulips

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I needed to head into town today, and when I got back, the girls were just finishing planting the last of the bulbs we had. Bulls Eye Tulips.

These have more finicky requirements. They are larger bulbs that need lots of sun, good drainage, and if we want them coming back year after year, deep planting; about 12 inches.

The area selected is in the West yard, among some crab apples and plum trees. This area was cleaned and cleared out of debris two summer ago. With all the dead trees and branches cut away, the ground does get good sunlight, while the remaining branches and surrounding trees protects it from hard rains.

While digging the holes, they found plenty of rocks – so they used them to mark out where the bulbs were planted!

The package came with 8 bulbs in total. When the back ordered items come in, there will be more tulips, which will also be planted in this area. I contacted Veseys, and we can expect our back order in the first or second week of October. Weather Canada has said to expect a long and mild fall and, from the looks of the long range forecast, we should still be good when they come in.

The girls got these in just in time. Shortly after, the winds started to pick up, and it’s blowing pretty good right now. We might be getting another rainfall tonight.

Drainage will definitely not be an issue in this location. In digging the holes for planting, they found the topsoil was only about 6 – 8 inches deep. Then they hit sand and gravel. As far as I know, this whole region is like that. I can remember when the will was dug by the house, after the well in the pump shack failed, and we finally got running water. A trench was dug towards the barn, and pipes laid to provide water to the barn and a couple of drinking fountains for the cows, plus the pipes that got diverted to the septic field. I was pretty young, but the top soil did look quite shallow, and I remember the trench being all through gravel and clay.

Another reason we want to build our soil up. Literally!

The Re-Farmer

Fall planting: iris

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I needed to make a run into town today, and by the time I came back, my daughter had selected a place to start planting, and gotten started.

She had selected Eye of the Tiger Iris, and I must say – Vesey’s really missed an opportunity for a punny name! :-D Eye-ris of the Tiger? Eye of the Tigris? :-D

But I digress!

These needed to be planted in a location with plenty of sun and good drainage. She decided they would make a good border on the south edge of the old kitchen garden. She had been digging holes with a trowel for each of the 15 bulbs in the bag. She had forgotten that I found a good spade, buried in the garden shed! Things went much faster when I could just dig a trench for her, instead.

She just had to contend with a few rocks, instead!

We should now have a border of irises extending from the laundry platform, to the chives at the edge of the retaining wall corner.

The only thing left to plant now (until the back ordered items come in) are the Bulls Eye Tulips. These are a little more complicated. They need hard winters (we’ve got that), hot summers (we usually have that) and full sun (we can find that) but they also need to be in a dry location and NOT watered or fertilized in the summer. So we can’t plant them around anything we will be watering or fertilizing. One of the areas we were talking about planting in was by the stone cross, but that’s an area that collects water when the snow melts, so that’s out.

Pretty much the entire West yard is quite dry, though. We might plant them in where the crab apple and plum trees are, south of a row of lilacs. One end of that area does get full sunlight.

We have to decide soon, though. Those bulbs need to get into the ground!

The Re-Farmer

Fall planting: snow crocus

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Of all the stuff that we ordered for fall planting this year, the garlic and the grape hyacinth were the two things I wanted. The rest were chosen by my daughters. Especially my younger daughter, who is really interested in flower gardening.

No surprise that she was eager to get out there today, and plant the snow crocuses!

This is the area we worked on today.

The first thing we needed to do was rake and clean up the space.

When I cleaned up in this area, two summers ago, I had to take out a lot of dead trees. I deliberately left really tall stumps, after discovering (the hard way!) what a tripping hazard they were if I didn’t. This year, I have a reciprocating saw, which does a great job of cutting level to the ground.

I took advantage of that.

It took more than a year longer than planned, but most of them are now trimmed. There are just a few further out that I didn’t bother with, yet.

While I was working on that, my daughter finished off the raking, then started scattering the bulbs.

Some of them are so tiny! Like little hazelnuts.

The snow crocus mix my daughter chose included Dorothy, Blue Pearl, Tricolour, Snowbunting and Spring Beauty.

Interestingly, when I looked up the mix on the Vesey’s website, it now has 4, not 5, varieties. It no longer includes the Snowbunting.

After the were all planted, my daughter watered all the areas we planted in, including the grape hyacinth, while I placed more logs to border where we planted.

Here is how it looks now.

It’s too windy to burn the debris from the first rake, which is mostly dead leaves, so that will wait for another day.

This section will have a walking path on both sides. Further north, it’s so shaded under those trees, almost nothing grows under there. Even the row of crab apple trees I found buried under the branches is still struggling – though one branch on one tree did get enough sun to produce some apples! :-/ Anything we end up planting there has to be able to handle a lot of shade, and not much moisture. But that is probably still years from now.

So for this area, we are done with planting for the year. Everything else we’ve got, plus the stuff on back order, will be planted elsewhere. We’ve got another week, at least, of warmer weather, so we will work on keeping these areas well watered.

All of the crocuses are supposed to bloom very early in the spring. I look forward to seeing them! I expect they will be rather spotty for the first few years, until they naturally begin to spread. Until they do, we’ll have to make sure they don’t get overtaken by other things. We can also think about what we might want to plant with them and the grape hyacinth that have different blooming seasons, once we get a good grasp on how they are doing.

At the same time, we’ll be looking into a ground cover in the pathways. By the time this area is done, it should have almost no grass and need no mowing.

One thing we do have to keep in mind as we fill these areas, though, is that we still need to have at least some access into them. If nothing else, we’ll need to pick up fallen branches or remove dead trees!

The Re-Farmer

Fall planting grape hyacinth, day two, and planning ahead

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The girls were sweethearts; by the time I got outside, they had already planted at least half of the second bag of grape hyacinths. One daughter was still using the broken trowel to dig the holes! It’s really unfortunate that the auger couldn’t be used. :-( That would have made the job must faster and easier!

I did find another trowel among the odds and ends we found while cleaning out the sun room, but it was so cheap, and the soil so hard, it kept bending. I used a weeding tool to loosen the soil, first, then I could gently dig a tiny little hole for each tiny little bulb. :-)

Then, while one daughter watered both sections we planted the bulbs in, my other daughter and I used pieces from the trees that were cut away from the power lines to mark things off.

At the far end it where a walkway will be. Eventually, there will be a sort of V shaped pair of walkways leading from the fire pit area to the broad path that runs down the middle of the grove. At the dead tree, near where the rolling seat is, we marked around a spot where wild strawberries are growing. There are more of them near a tree to the left of that spot, but with the bulbs planted on either side, we didn’t bother going in to mark them. At some point, I’d like to transplant those strawberries to somewhere they won’t be choked out by grasses and wildfowers, but wild strawberries are not the sort of thing that takes to being handled well. It does make me wonder how they ended up here! I used to find them only deep in the bushes, during very damp years, when I was a kid.

This is the next section we will be working in.

We have 20 bulbs each of 5 different types of snow crocus. This area is very narrow, so it should be quite enough to plant the length of this. These were my daughter’s choice, so I will leave it to her, whether we will plant each type separately, or mix them all together.

The crocus bulbs are even smaller than the grape hyacinth! They need to be only 3 inches deep into the soil.

Weather willing, we should be able to get this done tomorrow. After that, we might be done in this section for this year. We still have a double tulip collection on back order, with a total of 58 bulbs, but I’m not sure where they will be planted. I think they will need more sunlight than they can get in this area. The product info says “partial sunlight”, while the further we go in this area, the more “full shade” it gets! They might do quite well in the old kitchen garden, as long as they are planted closer to the house and away from the ornamental apples.

Something we still have time to think about!

Meanwhile, we will work on keeping these well watered while it’s still warm out, to make sure they are established before winter sets in.

I do hope the back ordered items come in soon. I really want to get the garlic in!

The Re-Farmer

Fall planting grape hyacinth, day one

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So a few things we’d talked about before have changed a bit, as we decided where to start planing the grape hyacinth (muscari).

This is the area we settled on, before clean up.

Two summers ago, this area was quite overgrown. Some of the lilacs and carigana I cut back have started to encroach again. I deliberately did not mow around here, because I wanted to see what would come up.

Not much, it turns out. Lots of crab grass, and a few of a type of wildflower we have all over the place.

In this area, there are rows of trees planted varying widths apart, with a path to the old garden that splits it into east and west sides (this is the west side we are working on). After clarifying where we wanted to keep walking paths, one of my daughters and I started raking, and I also cut away some of the encroaching lilacs, caragana and the maple suckers that were coming up.

The row of elm and maple on the left has a narrower space between them and another row of trees to the north. Then there is a wide space that will be kept open as a walking path, followed by several more rows of trees planted way too close together.

We will be planting a bag of bulbs on either side of the row of trees on the right of the photo, and not too close to the lilacs and caragana. We want to encourage them to spread outwards from that row of trees.

There was quite a lot of debris, so we ended up using the firepit to burn it. When my other daughter was able to come join us, they continued the hard physical labour, while I tended the fire. :-)

This sort of stuff makes for a very smoky fire!

After the dry debris on the surface was raked away, they went over it with a thatching rake to get even more up, and try and loosen the soil. The piles from what were not appropriate for burning, so they’re going to be used as a sort of mulch, elsewhere.

The girls even kept going and raked up the next area we’ll be planting in.

Just not today!

They also remembered that auger I bought, intending to use in the old garden area. On realizing how much rockier it was than expected, we never did.

So I got it out, attached it to our drill and tested it.

Yeeaahhh…

No.

That didn’t work. Too many roots! The auger would jam and stop turning, almost immediately! Those circles you see where as deep as I could go before it got hung up and starting making some very unfortunate noises.

Which may well have been a good thing, I guess.

After scattering a bag of bulbs fairly randomly in the prepared area, the girls got to work, digging 4 inch holes manually (the recommended depth for muscari) and planting them, while I continued to tend the fire.

We are now down a trowel.

There it is – with the rock that broke it!

We have another one, but no one can remember where it ended up, so they found another tool and continued.

Hitting a rock like that with the auger probably would not have broken the auger.

It would most likely have broken my drill, though!

Here is one section they worked in. It’s hard to tell where they planted the bulbs from the ground scuffed as they worked! It was a very difficult job, with many roots and rocks in the way. The soil is very hard. I know, however, that grape hyacinth can handle that, since I’ve seen them growing in much worse conditions!

The entire area has been watered and, tomorrow, we will work on the next section.

The crocuses will also be planted in this side of the maple grove (the east side still has piles of dead branches waiting to be chipped), but the iris and tulips will go someplace much more prominent and visible. They don’t have the spreading habit the grape hyacinth and crocuses do, so we’ll be more particular about bulb placement, too.

I’m so happy! When I was a kid, going through catalogs, grape hyacinth were among the things I always wanted to grow. When living in Victoria, BC, where they grew like weeds on the sides of roads (which is how I know they can handle the hard soil of this area just fine!) that only solidified my desire to have them. Now we finally do! And with a couple hundred bulbs planted, I think we can be assured of a decent number of them sprouting next spring.

As long as the skunks and squirrels don’t dig up and eat the bulbs!

The Re-Farmer