Gardening with Flower Bulbs

Once planted, flower bulbs can create beauty in your garden with little care and concern throughout the year. Your flower bulbs display may begin with snowdrops or crocus continue through summer with summer-blooming bulbs right into…

Once planted, flower bulbs can create beauty in your garden with little care and concern throughout the year. Your flower bulbs display may begin with snowdrops or crocus continue through summer with summer-blooming bulbs right into autumn with fall-blooming bulbs. Using flower bulbs that you force into bloom indoors, you can even have blooms in the middle of winter. Just check around the stores at Christmas time and you will see such forced blooms for sale.

Although the term flower bulbs actually means more than just true bulbs when we speak generically, for this purpose we mean any of the “bulbs” you plant underground that produce flowers for your gardening enjoyment.

Flower bulbs need a soil that has good drainage if planted in a bed. A sandy loam soil is ideal. However, bulbs will do well in just about any type of soil short of cold clay, soggy spots and very rocky ground. Even amongst the rocks you may find or can create some pockets of decent soil to plant some of the smaller flower bulbs. Adding plenty of organic matter always helps your soil as we have mentioned in other articles.

Some gardeners suggest a flowerbed where the bulbs will be planted should be prepared to a depth of two feet. This allows you to plant even the largest of bulbs to a good depth. But if the location is a low spot to which all other areas drain and holds water, it will not be a good spot to plant your bulbs regardless of how well you prepare the soil. Flower bulbs will rot where the soil holds water. Let’s just say that flower bulbs are not for the water garden.

Whatever spot you pick in your garden be sure it allows your flower bulbs to be in full sun. As most spring-flowering bulbs come up before the trees have their leaves, this caution may not be as great a concern for them. It is certainly a consideration when planting summer-flowering bulbs, which also need full sun and may be shaded by full-leafed trees. Keep this need for full sun in mind when planting near evergreens and man-made structures.

Some flower gardeners prefer to use bulbs to “naturalize” an area. To do this, you simply dig a hole big enough and deep enough for the bulb you are planting. You may also dig a hole big enough to hold four or five bulbs at a time. Put a little bulb fertilizer in the hole, place your bulbs in, replace the soil removed and cap with the sod you removed in making the hole.

A good rule of thumb for planting flower bulbs is three times as deep as the flower bulb is big. You may wish to consider planting some bulbs in your garden even deeper. Barbara Damrosch of Theme Gardens fame prefers to plant her bulbs, especially tulips and daffodils, deeper at ten inches. She prefers this to keep them from sprouting in the fall, being worked out of the ground by the freezing and thawing of it, and also to help protect the bulbs from being eaten by animals.

Copyright 2005, Sandra Dinkins-Wilson