Plant some bulbs to brighten your future
Fall is here and the cold long winter is not far away. Spring on the other hand seems like it’s a long way away and yet now is the time to start thinking about it if you want to have the color and smells of spring brighten your garden and refresh your spirit after the long cold winter. Planting some bulbs this fall is just the answer.
Bulbs are a most versatile group of plants; there is a type for any location. Winter Aconite with its bright yellow butter cup like flowers and Snowdrops often pop up during the brief warm-ups in winter, and it’s not unusual for them to have a drift of snow as their background. Daffodils are great to naturalize in your garden but it’s the Tulips that often make the biggest show with attractive mass plantings.
Tulips are probably the most popular bulb grown by gardeners, with most tulips sold today coming from the Netherlands. They are produced from hardy bulbs and should be planted in the fall. Tulips are easy to grow as long as the bulbs are healthy. So buy them in early fall and plant them in your garden in mid October. Planting tulips in your garden is not all that difficult and it’s a great fall activity that will reward you with delightful flowers come spring. The best bulbs to buy are the medium-sized and they should be planted approx. 6″-8″ deep though you need to plant them specifically according to their package – too deep and they won’t grow, too shallow and animals will dig them up for food. Planting bulbs can be fun as you can plan your garden by strategically placing the bulbs where you want them to go and spaced depending on the effect you want to create. The only rule is that they shouldn’t be close enough to touch each other.
A common frustration is you enjoy a great display in the spring one year but the following spring all you get is a smattering of flowers and maybe a bunch of leaves. What happened? Did I do something wrong? Some people have tulips that have bloomed every spring for as long as they can remember. Let me say, its not your fault. Today most tulips don’t flower well the second year after planting. This is the result of they way they are being developed under ideal growing conditions in Holland. Under your less-than-perfect garden conditions, (and which one of us has perfect garden conditions) when the bulbs split into smaller bulbs, those smaller bulbs are unlikely ever to grow to flowering size. And so your breathtaking tulip display dwindles to little or nothing.
The good news is that some tulips are willing to bloom well for more than one spring. Their bulbs are slow to split or they split unevenly, so that one of the smaller bulbs is still big enough to flower. With these you may get two or three good displays before you feel you need to replant. The best of these are the Darwin Hybrids, including varieties such as Apeldoorn, Oxford and Pink Impression. 
They come in bold colours and have big flowers and make big bulbs. They bloom in the middle of the spring bulb season. The earlier blooming Fosteriana tulips, which include the Emperor series, are more compact than the Darwin Hybrids, but their vase-shaped flowers are large and very showy. Others are the Greigii and Kaufmanniana tulips, which have attractively spotted leaves and are generally shorter and earlier than the others.
The most beautiful tulips however are not good perennials. With the cost of a bulb at 35 to 45 cents a bulb it won’t break the bank to plant new bulbs each year and when you look at it that way, even a one-shot tulip gives a great return on investment. Compared to other leisure activities, planting bulbs is less expensive, takes less time, is longer lasting and more beautiful.
Now is the time to make plans for spring by planting some bulbs to brighten your future.
Continually developing “Ideas for Outdoor Living”
October 7th, 2008 at 2:24 pm
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November 17th, 2008 at 6:22 am
flowers delivery
May 4th, 2009 at 4:22 pm
My bulbs are coming up and they look great.
January 4th, 2010 at 10:23 am
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