I may have mentioned that I have a little bulb, rhizome and tuber addiction, and that I share this enthusiasm with certain adorable rodents whose energetic annual efforts usually eradicate some portion of my own. I may have mentioned that sometimes as I plant bulbs in the fall it crosses my mind that I may not so much be laying out my spring garden as an elaborate Easter egg hunt for said rodents, except happening way, way before Easter. A Thanksgiving egg hunt, as it were. An intelligent person might stop doing it.
Nevertheless, a few weeks ago, this arrived on our doorstep:
Yeah, it's what you think. I'm not even going to pretend otherwise. It's only a couple hundred of them, though, and there aren't any tulips. This time I did NOT order tulips. 'Cause I know what will happen to them. I've given up on ordering them. I am not a complete fool.
Honest.
I have no idea how these got to my house. They must have leapt into my cart at the grocery store. And at Mahoney's.
Since they're here anyway, though, well, you know.
As you may also remember, there is a strip of dirt next to the road on the other side of our stockade fence which I do not entirely love and have been slowly attempting to beautify with odd plantings here and there. In the big brown box above are, among many other delights, 100 assorted daffodil bulbs from England. They are sworn to be a random mix, ten bags of ten bulbs each. Blooms are supposed to begin appearing in February and keep on coming through May.
As esteemed correspondent Cathy has noted, squirrels don't tend to nibble daffodil bulbs. Neither -- not that they're a problem here -- do deer. And I love daffodils. My endless crush on Gene Wilder is very much wrapped up with images of him sipping from a candy daffodil while wearing that purple velvet Wonka coat. I also love them chastely. I love them in every color, and every combination of colors, and every available form. They are cheerful, friendly, and smell amazing.
You know what else is really great about daffodils? If you plant them correctly, they spread all by themselves so that you end up with more daffodils year after year, especially if you plant cultivars which are supposed to be especially good at naturalizing, which, I am promised, these are. So if I plant 100 along this strip this year, in ten years the strip should be well packed with 'em. I do not know if I will live here then, but who cares? It will be beautiful, instead of an ugly dirt strip where garbage gathers in drifts and people occasionally let their dogs leave poop. Or it will just hide the garbage and the poop, or mingle with it. Either way, it will be better than it was before we lived here.
This time, I have everything I need to do some planting. I have not just one but two sacks of lovely compost.
I have excellent coffee and a sturdy trowel.
I have beautiful, French, red leather gloves and a wicked awesome British dibble (or dibber, depending on where you're from).
I am ready to start! (And it's not even January! And I'm not even out here with a bucket of warm but not cookably hot water to thaw the earth so I can plant the bulbs that have sprouted in their bags while I thought for a few months about where I wanted to put them! And I think it's best if I don't say another word about any of that just now.)
The first step will be to evenly distribute the daffodils. I don't want them to be too even, because that will look dorky. Except when you're completely blanketing an area with one species, most bulbs look best when they are planted in clumps and when they aren't planted in regimental rows, even regimental rows of artful clumps. Still, I don't want a bunch lumped at one end and nothing in the middle. So I will take my ten bags and plop them at even intervals along the strip, like so:
Now it's time to get on the ground.
Because I have a fake right leg, and because I choose to wear it at all times when I am in public, even for something like this, it makes sense to start from the gate (which is just outside this shot at the lower right). The fake leg is just dead weight when you are gardening close to the ground. It drags along and messes stuff up. However, as I have said, at no time do I ever want to be out on a public street without the ability to just get up and go at will. Yes, this is my tiny, quiet street trafficked by few in a very safe suburban town. And yes, I do have that vicious little dibble which can rupture an eyeball (I imagine) even easier than it drills earth. Still, you never know what can happen, and I like to be able to just get up and walk. It's what I got the darned prosthetic for, after all.
So as long as I am moving in the right direction, I can just drag the leg behind me while I work and not get all tangled up in it, and keep it out of the planting bed.
So what I'm going to do here, now that I'm on the ground and have evenly distributed my bags of bulbs, is I'm going to work my way down the strip and plant one bagful at a time. I will rip open the first bag, and then I will just kind of throw the contents around, sort of randomly sprinkling/tossing the bulbs willy-nilly. I will plant them wherever they fall (unless they fall too evenly spaced). Here's what that looks like:
I'm going to plug these in wherever they fell -- next to weeds, next to trees, next to each other. I will do this nine times more, everywhere else I have dropped a bag of daffodil bulbs. I will sprinkle the bulbs at each bag-defined section so that there are not obvious gaps between where one bag's contents end and another's begin. See? Random, but only just.
Now, I've been planting bulbs for a very long time. I have tried a number of different methods. I have learned to avoid tulips, but don't, but there's no sense going on about that. I have learned that a lot of advice about what to plant with them to nourish them is either (as with bone meal) destined to attract critters to eat them up or kind of useless (time-release plant food). I have come up with my own method which, except for tulips, whose safety I simply cannot guarantee, gets me a pretty high initial bloom and very successful naturalizing rates.
I do not completely know why this method works. Again, the basic principle of organic gardening is to nourish the soil, and the soil will nourish the plant. Bulbs like a light sandy soil best, though, and compost isn't sand, and when you mix it into dirt, even sandy dirt loses its sandiness. This purchased compost, too -- and we will not discuss why I have to purchase compost even though I have a big black composter at this time -- is very wet, especially after sitting in bags with holes in them in stacks in the rain. So plopping this compost on top of or around a bulb is not exactly going to give the bulb a feeling of sandiness around itself, either. This should not logically be good for the bulbs, what I do, but apparently it is, because they thrive, and they have not thrived (thriven? throve?) when I have tried other methods.
Regardless of why it works, or how I came up with it (a complicated tale of gardening in a polluted, soil-stripped town for nearly ten years), here's what I do. First, duh, dig a hole for the bulb. Bulbs like to be buried deepish. Some people use a metal cylinder to make a big hole in the dirt at just the right depth. I don't know why, but I feel it best to disturb the earth as little as possible. Again, counterintuitive, I know; I would plant little else this way. I have this feeling about bulbs, though, that to survive in New England year after year, the bulb is going to have to break its own ground to a certain extent, make its own pathways, claim its own territories. If it can't do that, I can't help but feel it's doomed. I may even have specific experience to back this up, but I can't remember anymore. Whatever it was, it has passed from consciousness into the realm of Gardener's Instinct, Right or Wrong.
The dibble pierces the ground very deeply. Then I widen the tapering hole it makes by wiggling the dibble in place.
I plop the bulb into the hole. (I actually plop it in deeper than this, but found it difficult to photograph.)
Then I cover it with compost I trowel on. I completely fill in the hole, but do not pack it tightly, and cover the compost with whatever soil and especially mulch I displaced.
I love working close to the earth like this. I love the detailed intimacy. Down here, a weed can be a shrub. Down here are odd things buried in the soil and the mulch, part of it maybe, that may not obviously belong to the world you think you know, the plot of earth you think is yours.
Down here a sprig of poison ivy is a lovely autumn tree, and a chunk of fence which has fallen off and rots gracefully, feeding the soil, feeding and housing countless organisms, is a life raft adrift in a sea of crispy leaves, something you thought was debris while standing and suddenly, while squatting down into this other world, your fingers in its flesh, find yourself not wanting to disturb.
Down here you can be mesmerized by red dots that are the autumn gifts of the same shrub that stabbed your fingers when you touched it last spring trying to get a better look at its beautiful yellow flowers and figure out what it was. You may or may not notice that they are the same colour as your blood.
It's a whole other parking strip when you get down on your knees and fingertips and look it square in the leaf mold. And if you do your job right as a gardener -- but also if you don't -- it will be a whole other world even than this come spring.
Come back in six months and I'll show you what that looks like. Likely, in spite of the undermining enthusiasm of rodents, it won't have been so terribly pointless after all.
___________
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