Don't Be Bulb Light

To garden is to invest in the future, but come fall, too many gardeners decide they’ve had enough of this investment business and deal only in the final, fleeting moments of their landscapes’ beauty. Yet September is the key time for performing one final act of gardening that produces bountiful payoff the next spring: planting bulbs.

Decide not to plant bulbs this fall, and you’ll kick yourself next spring when scant few other perennials rise from their winter slumber to grace the garden with immediate bold color and form. If new to gardening, you should know that planting bulbs is easy, in many ways easier than planting annuals and perennials—so grab some weekend hours over the next few weeks and dig in.

Minnesota was a dicey investment, as our state lies in the very northernmost reaches of tulip viability. Our coldest winters can knock tulip bulbs for a loop, to the extent that a planting of several dozen tulips one fall often diminishes to a scant half dozen survivors only a few years later. For better success growing tulips, adhere to the following:

* Virtually all tulip bulbs available for purchase in Minnesota come from Holland, and Dutch growers, aided by U.S. bulb specialists, have made great strides in producing hardier and more robust tulip varieties developed specifically for northern climates. So simply buying fresh bulbs this fall will give you multiple years of bloom that will expand year after year in the garden bed.

* Plant tulips deeper than is suggested on the package. Those are generic instructions designed for the majority of gardeners who live somewhat closer to the Mason–Dixon line. In Minnesota, plant tulips eight to ten inches deep. This extra depth drops the bulbs a few inches below the severe winter frost zone that makes tulip bulbs yearn for the wimpy winters of Holland. Some Minnesota gardeners plant tulip bulbs twelve inches deep; I’ve tried it, and the tulips came up just fine. No, they won’t be shorter.

* Plant tulips, and any bulb plant, the easy way: Rather than messing with one of those ineffective and vexing bulb-planting devices that necessitates removing a small core of earth and planting the bulbs one by one, dig up sunny areas oPlanf the garden to a depth of ten inches or so. Scratch bone meal or a granular bulb fertilizer into the soil in the planting area, then lightly push the bulbs into the soil, with the pointed tip up and the flatter, root end down. Space tulip bulbs between four and six inches apart. Planting bulbs at different depths—eight inches, ten inches, twelve inches—will stagger bloom time. Shovel the removed soil back over the bulbs, and water thoroughly.

* Key to successfully growing all bulb plants is to plant them in soil that drains well. If dealing with heavy clay, remove it to a depth of fourteen inches and order the required amount of black topsoil or amend the clay with copious amounts of organic matter. Cover bulb planting areas with a good foot of fluffed marsh hay to keep frost from penetrating deeply.

* When it comes to quantities of tulips to plant, realize that a dozen tulips, if that number constitutes the grand total for your garden, is nothing. Buying twelve, then planting six over here and a few over there and one here and two there will make for a disappointing spring show. If you’re going to invest in the future, go whole hog.

I recall that during cocktail chatter one evening a gardener whose yard I knew well mentioned that she and her husband had spent the day planting 250 tulip bulbs. The nongardener in the circle spat out a large sip of drink. I recall thinking that for a half-acre lot with numerous curving garden beds 250 bulbs was about right. 
Try planting ten to twelve tulips a foot or two back from the street at the start of the driveway—then multiple similar plantings farther back and over there, then a spot of thirty or forty in a different area as you move closer to the house, with a final splash of eighty or more bulbs right up near the house. Now you'll get the dazzling type of floral effect that makes traffic slow down, particularly if the plantings are placed such that the eye zigzags up through your yard as it follows the color swatches from the street to midyard to the house. It's the old water analogy: a meandering stream widening into rapids culminating in a roaring waterfall.

Now that you’re all in a lather and ready to race out to plant tulips, be advised that you should hold off until the first week of October. Remember, bulbs may have developed over the centuries into genetic wonders, but they're still dumb as posts—tulips being the dumbest. Plant tulips in the warm soil of early September, water them, and should we get a sunny and mild October, they'll not only establish roots, they'll proceed straight ahead into Plan A, which is to bloom, and will pop their tips up out of the ground just about the same time you're putting fresh spark plugs in the snow blower.

Daffodils seem to have developed a better grasp of the concept and wait for spring to grow and bloom, so they can safely be planted in mid-September. Follow pretty much the same design considerations and planting procedure for daffodils as described for tulips above.

The Other Bulbs Are tulips and daffodils the only bulbs to plant this fall? Certainly not! Planting nothing but tulips and daffodils for spring color is like relying on just two herbaceous perennials to create an interesting midsummer flower bed. Try planting some of the other, lesser-known bulbs in your garden this fall, and you'll be amazed by the variety of sizes, colors, forms, and scents unveiled next spring. Here are some extremely hardy, fabulous bulb plants that you'll find in the garden centers right now—all can be planted now through mid-October: Crocus—OK, no big surprise here, plenty of gardeners grow crocuses, but, for those new to gardening, these are among the earliest to bloom—many varieties often push their blooms up through the early April remnants of snow. Muscari—The very first exotic bulb I grew after completing the mandatory five years of tulip and daffodil planting. Small bubbles of pure white flowers cover the top half of the grasslike stalks and leaves in a cannonball pattern. Only six to ten inches tall, they hold their bloom up to three weeks. Fritillaria—Here’s a most dazzling plant, which I’ve found tolerates damp spots—a scenario that usually spells death-by-rot for bulbs. The flowers hang downward ("pendant") in a huge assortment of colors. Eranthis—A short, early yellow bloomer that works well in combination with crocus. Actually prefers partial shade, a rarity for spring-blooming bulbs. Allium—Onion, for short. June to July bloomers in the one- to four-foot range. I grow A. giganteum, which produces perfect, four-inch spheres with blue-gray leaves and pink-purple flowers atop forty-inch stems and is praised by my neighbors.

Don Engebretson can be e-mailed from his website, renegadegardener.com.