As the Garden Grows

What's blooming today?


You are here: Home / Archives for Bulbs

Use your gardening downtime wisely

by

How are you keeping yourself busy this month? Have you been spending time thinking about your garden? Reading gardening magazines and books? If you’re like me you probably have a number of seed and plant related catalogues to read. I think mine started being delivered in the mail from late November onward.

It’s too cold to go outside and do anything in the garden – other than shovel the snow that is.

If you want to have a great garden this season, you’ll find that thinking and planning are the two best things that you can be doing during these cold months. Use your garden downtime well.

If you’re like me you probably took some photos of your garden as the plants grew and filled in last season. You might have even made some notes- move this plant over here – it’s not getting enough sun, or it’s getting too much sun. Divide this plant and replant a cluster of them over here and so on.

Try to remember which of your plants did well and which ones didn’t last year. Have any of them been struggling for a few years? Is it time to move them or replace them?

As you flip through the gardening magazines and catalogues make notes of which plants, flowers and bulbs you’d like to try in your garden. Even if you aren’t purchasing them now, or perhaps you’d rather try them by seed rather than as a seeding – keep track of what you like. Then as the time comes to purchase the plants or seeds you’ll have a nice list that you can go over and pick from as you buy your new plants.

I’ve been using this site to keep track of which plants did well last year. Oddly enough, anytime I wrote about a plant not doing well and threatened to remove it if it didn’t start performing soon, amazingly enough it did start shaping up! Why I have no idea – did I actually give it a bit more attention since I was trying to figure out what it’s problem was, or did my threats work? Either way, I’ll be giving some of my plants some verbal threats next year – just in case.

Here’s a few great gardening books to keep you busy over the winter months:

Perennials for Every Purpose: Choose the Right Plants for Your Conditions, Your Garden, and Your Taste (A Rodale Organic Gardening Book)

This is an excellent book. I’ve got a copy of it and it keeps me busy for hours!

The Big Book of Flower Gardening: A Guide to Growing Beautiful Annuals, Perennials, Bulbs, and Rose

Another excellent book that I own. There are some great gardening tips in this book.

Annuals for Every Purpose: Choose the Right Plants for Your Conditions, Your Garden, and Your Taste (A Rodale Organic Gardening Book)

I don’t have a copy of this book … yet, but it’s on my list!






Helpful gardening tips

by

Here’s a a few handy gardening tips that you might find useful, particularly if you are new to gardening:

1. Do your homework. Visit public gardens, read magazines and books.

2. Amend the soil for success. Lighten clay loam soil with compost.

3. Design for surprise: place some curves in your design or interesting nooks that visitors to your garden have to enter to see what magically beautiful plant you have growing there.

4. If you inherit a garden: Wait a season to see what comes up. You may destroy something you want to save. We were lucky to have purchased our house in June. I was able to watch what grew that year and used the following winter to plan out my new garden.

5. Smart plant picks. Purchase plants that are drought tolerant or said to be easy to care for if you don’t want to spend too much time in the garden watering and pruning.

The Well-Designed Mixed Garden: Building Beds and Borders with Trees, Shrubs, Perennials, Annuals, and Bulbs

6. Mass appeal. Plant large areas with one flower in one color, such as purple phlox. You can always tell who’s a beginning gardener because they plant one of each plant. masses of three to five or more plants planted together in the garden bed make a much more satisfying display.

7. A wild prairie garden can be work until it gets established. If you want a natural looking garden find out what plants are native to your area and use them abundantly.

8. Japanese-style garden do’s. For dimension, build hills and cover them with moss.

9. Time-saving trick. Plant hosta around the base of trees and you won’t have to trim around them.

10. Get the kids to help. Most kids like helping in the garden. You may still end up doing more work than they do, but it’s a way to spend some quality time with them and also a way to get them outside.

11. Sure-fire critter repeller – build a fence with a gate if you want to keep out skunks, who don’t climb but can dig just fine) and other pets that might frequent your garden. Gates and fences don’t stop all critters but a fence might deter a few of them.

The Organic Gardener’s Handbook of Natural Insect and Disease Control: A Complete Problem-Solving Guide to Keeping Your Garden and Yard Healthy Without Chemicals

Paperwhites love a little drink of Gin

by

Now here’s a few tips that you might not have heard of or thought of before:

If your forced paperwhite Narcissus, are flopping over there is a remedy – an odd one at that. Researchers at Cornell discovered an old home remedy for top heavy paperwhites that will help keep them in place – give them a good stiff drink. That’s right, put a little bit of gin in the water and watch their heavy heads lift. You can use an assortment of alcohols for these boozy plants – vodka, rum, tequila and whisky all seem to work equally well.

Another tip to steady your paperwhites as they grow is to start them in plain water until the roots begin to show and the stems are a couple of inches in length. Once they reach this stage, drain the water and use an alcohol/water mix by mixing one part liquor to seven parts water. Continue to water them with this 5% alcohol mixture and they should stay upright and happy. Use the alcohols mentioned above for best results. This mix stunts the growth of the stems by a third to one half but doesn’t affect the size or production of the blooms.

You should also keep your paperwhites in a bright, yet cool room as they will grow at a slower rate in the cool room. The prefered room temperature would be closer to 60 degrees than 70 degree’s F. You can also place the bulbs in a container of pebbles, water or soil rather than growing the bulbs in a water filled container. Maintain the waterline below the bulb level or they may rot. Water the roots, not the bulb. This holds true for Amaryllis and hyacinths as well.

Also, apparently bulbs started after the new year will grow more quickly and and be shorter plants than bulbs started in December.

Meta