Bulb Blues

19.01.2024 - 23:46 / backyardgardener.com / Frederick Leeth

Not long ago, I was talking to a gardening friend. The subject was spring bulbs, and her lament was that she just didn’t have the time to get them in the ground. “I’ve given up buying bulbs,” she said, “because every year they end up rotting in my garage.” I can sympathize with her, because of every fall, at least in my little corner of the world, sinister forces conspire to take away the weekends that I intended to spend planting all the bulbs that I ordered back in August.

The problem is, if you don’t plant bulbs, you won’t have all those lovely daffodils, tulips, crocus and hyacinths next spring. What you will have is depression over the lack of beauty after the long gray winter, coupled with envy of your neighbors who did manage to get something in. There are enough sources of depression in the world, without trying to eliminate those that are easily treatable.

So take heart. It really isn’t too late. If the ground has not frozen where you are, you can still plant those bulbs. Now, however, is not the time to use that wimpy little dibble that you ordered from one of the high-end garden catalogs. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Take a sturdy spade and dig trenches so that you can install handfuls at a time. Using this method you can actually get quite a few bulbs in the ground in a relatively short period of time. It also makes it possible to create fair sized clumps of individual cultivars, and those will look quite dramatic in the spring.

If the ground has frozen, and you don’t feel up to digging bulb holes with dynamite, there is another viable alternative. Go to the garden center or out into that neglected corner of the garage and get as many wide, shallow pots as you can. If you have taken the garden