Planting (and Belatedly Protecting) Bulbs
Earlier this month I got a giant box in the mail. The fall-planted bulbs arrived!
Here in all their un-planted glory are 100 tulips, 250 daffodils, and 300 Siberian squill. That's a LOT of bulbs! For a refresher, you can check out what the flowers will look like when they come up in April here.
As excited as I was to get these in the mail, it was hard to motivate myself to get them planted. The weather was actually too good to do it over Columbus Day weekend — we were out enjoying ourselves doing other things. On Monday of the long weekend, though, I finally made myself get out there and start digging, with the help of Kirk and a young friend of Jonas' (who was a quite interested and very helpful).
Daffodils need to be planted about 6 inches down, so that means driving the spade or hand trowel to the hilt. I am too cheap to buy a special bulb-planting tool that won't get much use, so this was pretty labor-intensive and kind of hard on the hands. After many bulbs were in the ground, I developed a rhythm: two scoops of dirt in one direction, another at 90 degrees from that. On the fourth (and final) push with the spade, keep it in the hole and pressed flat against one side of the hole, to hold back the dirt while quickly pressing the bulb down to the bottom along the back of the spade. The innovative holding-back action saved time that I had previously been wasting as dirt fell back into the hole I just had dug. These are the things you pick up after 50-60 bulbs or so.
All told, it took three afternoons to finish planting all those bulbs, and the last ones went in just before it started to rain last Wednesday. The planting on Tuesday and Wednesday I did almost all by myself after work, although I did have some help from Tiegan with some of the small squill bulbs on Tuesday. A good system for planting bulbs with kids (or anyone, really, if you are a controlling designer and don't want your helpers to guess where you want each one planted) is to place each one where you want it on top of the soil, and have the worker bees come in behind you to put them in the ground.
The large bulbs in this photo are the tulips; the small purple-skinned ones are Siberian squill. I found it helpful for myself to lay them out, too, because it helped me visualize what the drifts of flowers would look like in bloom. That takes some imagination, because most of the perennials that I am planting around will not be up in April when these flowers take off.
Just when I was ready to rest from all the planting (and from a fever I had spiked on Thursday), I saw THIS when I went to get the mail:
And THIS:
AND I saw a squirrel running along our fence with a whole daffodil bulb in its mouth, but I don't have a photo of that because in a feverish rage I threw open the back door and scared the shit out of him so he dropped the bulb and didn't come back for the rest of the day. I'm pretty sure that part actually happened and wasn't a hallucination.
Well, goddammit. Of course I know that squirrels are greedy assholes that ruin everything. But so far at this house, they haven't been much of a problem, so I kind of forgot about the whole burying-chicken-wire-over-your-bulbs thing. But daffodils are poisonous, and squill aren't supposed to be tasty, so they shouldn't have been so attracted to my planting anyway, right?
Sigh.
My solution was to go outside in the misty rain (still feverish!) and cover as much as I could with our bird netting and hold it down with rocks. Oh, and poke a ton of squirrel-rejected bulbs back into their holes (near as I could guess, anyway). On Saturday morning I went and got a lot more netting (maybe not the classic solution for this issue, but we'll need it in the future for the berries anyway), and dealt with it flying around in the wind as I eventually got it into position to cover almost the entire perennial border.
It's a little weird looking because taller plants are bent over under the netting, and there are random bricks all over, but for the most part this is invisible-ish. It seems to be working, based on A) no more holes or misplaced bulbs lying about, and B) a frantic chipmunk shaking around in the hydrangea because he got in the netting and couldn't figure out how to get out. I didn't help him.
I have no idea how many bulbs were lost in this saga, but we'll find out in the spring. I hope the carnage looked worse than it actually was, and that the netting does its job until I have to remove it to clean up and mulch for winter--a task I now plan to put off until as long as possible, which is hopefully until squirrels are all hibernating for winter.
Oh, and in case you are soft and were worried about the chipmunk, don't fret: his body (living or dead) was nowhere to be found an hour later, so he must have figured it out.
Here in all their un-planted glory are 100 tulips, 250 daffodils, and 300 Siberian squill. That's a LOT of bulbs! For a refresher, you can check out what the flowers will look like when they come up in April here.
As excited as I was to get these in the mail, it was hard to motivate myself to get them planted. The weather was actually too good to do it over Columbus Day weekend — we were out enjoying ourselves doing other things. On Monday of the long weekend, though, I finally made myself get out there and start digging, with the help of Kirk and a young friend of Jonas' (who was a quite interested and very helpful).
Daffodils need to be planted about 6 inches down, so that means driving the spade or hand trowel to the hilt. I am too cheap to buy a special bulb-planting tool that won't get much use, so this was pretty labor-intensive and kind of hard on the hands. After many bulbs were in the ground, I developed a rhythm: two scoops of dirt in one direction, another at 90 degrees from that. On the fourth (and final) push with the spade, keep it in the hole and pressed flat against one side of the hole, to hold back the dirt while quickly pressing the bulb down to the bottom along the back of the spade. The innovative holding-back action saved time that I had previously been wasting as dirt fell back into the hole I just had dug. These are the things you pick up after 50-60 bulbs or so.
All told, it took three afternoons to finish planting all those bulbs, and the last ones went in just before it started to rain last Wednesday. The planting on Tuesday and Wednesday I did almost all by myself after work, although I did have some help from Tiegan with some of the small squill bulbs on Tuesday. A good system for planting bulbs with kids (or anyone, really, if you are a controlling designer and don't want your helpers to guess where you want each one planted) is to place each one where you want it on top of the soil, and have the worker bees come in behind you to put them in the ground.
The large bulbs in this photo are the tulips; the small purple-skinned ones are Siberian squill. I found it helpful for myself to lay them out, too, because it helped me visualize what the drifts of flowers would look like in bloom. That takes some imagination, because most of the perennials that I am planting around will not be up in April when these flowers take off.
Just when I was ready to rest from all the planting (and from a fever I had spiked on Thursday), I saw THIS when I went to get the mail:
And THIS:
AND I saw a squirrel running along our fence with a whole daffodil bulb in its mouth, but I don't have a photo of that because in a feverish rage I threw open the back door and scared the shit out of him so he dropped the bulb and didn't come back for the rest of the day. I'm pretty sure that part actually happened and wasn't a hallucination.
Well, goddammit. Of course I know that squirrels are greedy assholes that ruin everything. But so far at this house, they haven't been much of a problem, so I kind of forgot about the whole burying-chicken-wire-over-your-bulbs thing. But daffodils are poisonous, and squill aren't supposed to be tasty, so they shouldn't have been so attracted to my planting anyway, right?
Sigh.
My solution was to go outside in the misty rain (still feverish!) and cover as much as I could with our bird netting and hold it down with rocks. Oh, and poke a ton of squirrel-rejected bulbs back into their holes (near as I could guess, anyway). On Saturday morning I went and got a lot more netting (maybe not the classic solution for this issue, but we'll need it in the future for the berries anyway), and dealt with it flying around in the wind as I eventually got it into position to cover almost the entire perennial border.
It's a little weird looking because taller plants are bent over under the netting, and there are random bricks all over, but for the most part this is invisible-ish. It seems to be working, based on A) no more holes or misplaced bulbs lying about, and B) a frantic chipmunk shaking around in the hydrangea because he got in the netting and couldn't figure out how to get out. I didn't help him.
I have no idea how many bulbs were lost in this saga, but we'll find out in the spring. I hope the carnage looked worse than it actually was, and that the netting does its job until I have to remove it to clean up and mulch for winter--a task I now plan to put off until as long as possible, which is hopefully until squirrels are all hibernating for winter.
Oh, and in case you are soft and were worried about the chipmunk, don't fret: his body (living or dead) was nowhere to be found an hour later, so he must have figured it out.
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