There are two ways to plant hardy spring-flowering bulbs. You can be impetuous, impatient, and in a hurry (like me)—and get them on the ground the day the mailman delivers the package. Results?
Pink hyacinths are too close to the ‘Red Emperor’ tulips. Naturalized daffodils that divide so fast and furiously (because of shallow planting) must be lifted and replanted in the second or third year.
Hungry tulips that haven’t enough nourishment to make new bulbs big and strong enough to flower. Crocuses are planted so close they’re on top of each other by the second season.
Or you can be smart (like the new me)—plan, buy, prepare, and plant carefully—and reap a quintuple reward from your investment of time and money.
Spring after spring you can be refreshed by the sight of healthy, thriving crocuses, daffodils, tulips, and miscellaneous delights like Muscari, Galanthus, and scilla, and by the thought that proper planting has eliminated most or all of the work of maintenance.
Haste certainly makes waste here, and a stitch in time saves more than nine.
Important Step—Planning
Before buying tulips to fill a formal bed, narcissus for the group at the base of a rock, or any bulbs to brighten the border, foundation planting, or rock garden, first ensure the site is suitable.
Some conditions can’t be changed, and bulbs are better planted in more favorable spots.
Plenty of Sunlight For Abundant Blooms
For the thriftiest growth and most bountiful bloom, all spring-flowering bulbs need plenty of sunlight during the flowering season, some sun, and good daylight at other times.
For example, they should not be in the deep shade of evergreens or on the north side of a wall or fence.
They’ll do fine near deciduous trees and shrubs that don’t leaf out fully until the flowering time is over. If the branches are not so low, they cut off all summer sun and most of the light.
Sparse bloom and spindly pale foliage often indicate a lack of light.
Another “Must” is Drainage
Bulbs don’t object to having their roots in water (hyacinths and paperwhite narcissus are forced that way), but they’ll rot in soggy soil at the bulb base or higher. Don’t plant bulbs in low, boggy areas or heavy, muddy soil.
If you have no area with natural drainage, consider building beds raised 6″ inches or more and edging decoratively with stone, brick, cement blocks, or something similar.
A more costly alternative is installing tiles that drain excess moisture away to some other section of the landscape.
Less crucial, but still to be considered, are such factors as whether the ripening foliage may be an eyesore or can be camouflaged by nearby shrubs or perennials; and whether heavy winds and rains can rip the flowers to shreds before you have a chance to enjoy them.
Even slight protection from slopes, rocks, evergreens, and other windbreaks will help here.
Give a Good Site
Most bulbs can be counted on to flower for a year or two. Indeed, flower buds for the first season are already formed when you buy the bulbs in the fall. But for a long, bright life, there is one condition you can change, usually without great effort.
You can improve almost any soil to a bulb’s liking. Heavy clay texture can be opened up and made lighter by mixing it with some humus like leaf mold, compost, or peat, plus plenty of fine gravel or coarse builders’ sand.
Soil that’s so sandy it can’t hold moisture benefits by the addition of humus in almost any form except, perhaps, rotted manure that may cause rot on any bulb or stem it touches.
Here’s a case where dehydrated manures seem to be safest.
Moist Soil For Bulbs
Most soils (but not those highly alkaline) are better for bulbs with a light sprinkling of horticultural lime (raw ground limestone).
Infertile soils can be fertilized—the bone meal is good, or chemical fertilizers with balanced proportions of the essential elements (nitrogen, phosphorus, potash) plus trace elements. Some bulbs need more food than others.
In order of ravenous appetite, the spring bloomers might be ranked—hyacinths the hungriest; tulips next, particularly the new, large, luscious hybrids; large-flowering daffodils, and then the more modest types; and least demanding, the crocus and other small-flowering species.
If possible, this job of conditioning and enriching soil should be done sometime before the bulbs are planted so the improved mixture can settle down and mellow. And it should be done at least to the depth of the bulbs’ roots or a minimum of 8″ inches.
Lifting a spadeful of soil, improving it, and replacing it will do for small clumps. “Double-digging” is usually recommended for large beds— a formal planting of tulips. And I hereby recommend it for naturalizing daffodils in soils as rocky as ours in Connecticut.
A thorough job with a spade (and sometimes, even a pickax) couldn’t possibly be more tiresome and should be less frustrating than having your trowel strike stone wherever you want to dig a hole. And the bulbs are better off, without a doubt.
Steps In Double Digging
The first step in double-digging is to clear the area of weeds and debris. If there is sod, slice it off an inch or so deep.
Then, starting at one end, dig a trench the width and depth of the spade, and lay up the soil nearby. Next to this trench, dig another—but turn the spadefuls of soil over into the first trench. Repeat the process until you have dug all the soil in the section to be planted.
You can break up clods, remove rocks, and smooth the surface slightly as you go along, or work over the complete area when this first digging is done.
Now, add your soil-improving ingredients—sprinkle lime and fertilizer evenly over the surface; lay on layers of humus, compost, sand, gravel, or whatever is needed. And starting at the end where you finished, repeat the digging-trenching process, finally replacing the soil you laid up nearby.
In this way, conditioners and fertilizers are thoroughly mixed through the soil and down to a depth where the bulbs’ roots can use them to their advantage.
You can plant bulbs into this lavishly prepared soil as soon as they arrive. Or, if you must wait a week or more, store them where they will be cool but not dry until planting time.
Rather than let them shrivel in dry air, put them in their packages on a layer of moist peat or vermiculite or beneath a layer of moist newspaper.
Planting Bulbs
Planting bulbs in any formal arrangement is a precision process.
Bulbs of the same size should be set at the same depth to ensure they will flower simultaneously. And spacing between bulbs and between rows should be measured accurately.
It’s often wise to excavate the complete bed to a uniform depth, set the bulbs according to spacings marked or notched on a stick or stake, and replace all the soil on top.
Informal groups are less exact and more decorative without a regular pattern, but uniform planting depth is still desirable.
Nice groups in a small perennial border begin with six or eight tulip or large-flowering daffodil bulbs set in the bottom of a hole of proper size and shape; groups can be larger in more spacious borders.
Or plant a dozen daffodils at the base of a large rock, a clump of six or eight hyacinths at the base of a tree, crocuses in crevices of a rocky slope, Galanthus on top of a wall. If possible, the smaller bulbs should be high to show off to their best advantage.
Naturalizing Daffodils
Naturalizing daffodils along a woodland walk, beside a stream or pool, or in a field or meadow so they look natural is an art. There are no hard-and-fast rules to be followed, only some tips that may be helpful.
Mixtures of several varieties are seldom successful because of varying sizes, colors, and flowering times. Rather, limit each “drift” to one variety—and plant the bulbs in anything but regular arrangements.
Some gardeners say they scatter the bulbs haphazardly and plant each where it falls. I prefer to arrange them but irregularly, closer together near the center or near one edge, and gradually spaced farther apart as if they had spread naturally.
The object is, of course, to reproduce nature’s carefree pictures that are so much at home in their surroundings.
Naturalized daffodils may be planted several inches deeper so they will multiply more slowly and thus require dividing and replanting less often.
Mulching Newly Planted Bulbs
Whether to mulch or not to mulch newly planted bulbs is a real question. If the varieties are hardy in your area and planted in plenty of time to develop good root systems before the ground freezes, the answer is probably—don’t.
A warm, cozy mulch is a premature invitation to mice and other rodents to move in for the winter.
Late planted and less hardy bulbs have a better chance of surviving the winter (particularly the dangerous alternate freezes-and-thaws of mild winters) under an airy blanket of evergreen boughs, salt hay, or something similarly light.
Apply the mulch after the ground has frozen to a depth of an inch or so, and not before.
44659 by Bernice Brilmayer