The Adventures of Baxter and Tony

Episode 2 - Tony and Baxter Plant Spring Bulbs

At my house we really love the bright colors of early spring bulbs so I've been adding some bulbs to our landscape.  I've got one bed of tulips with about one hundred bulbs but I saw big boxes of tulips, daffodils and hyacinths at Sam's last October so I bought another one hundred seventy bulbs to add to my collection.  They require a certain amount of cold weather to thrive and therefore prefer to be planted in the fall. I fully intended to plant these by Thanksgiving but procrastination got the best of me and so the new year has come and gone and the bulbs still weren't planted.  Yesterday, Baxter, our intrepid wonder Schnauzer, finally convinced me to plant the bulbs.  This is our story.

Here's Baxter with our bulbs and planting equipment.  As you can see Baxter, ever the taskmaster, scolded me with his eyes since he knew we were about two months late planting our bulbs.  In spite of his skepticism and ugly attitude, I felt it would be okay to go ahead and plant the bulbs.  They were stored in the garage so they had been in the cold.  Plus, the last time I planted tulip bulbs I waited until the end of January and they've done well.  I decided to forge ahead!

Baxter picked the new mulch bed near the front porch as the first spot to plant bulbs.  I moved all the stuff, bulbs, planter, etc. and he surveyed the lay of the land.  After picking our spot I grabbed a bunch of bulbs and threw them on the ground.  I don't know where I learned this technique but it works pretty good and makes the layout of your bulb garden look more natural.  There's always a little bit of adjustment to get the plant spacing right, about 6" apart, but I usually like the results.

You can see the bulbs after they were spaced out before I planted them.  Baxter is giving the layout a final inspection before we plant them.  My planting technique is to use a hand tool I bought which looks like a miniature pick.  Sharp point on one side and a spade blade on the other side.  Just drive the spade into the ground to the proper depth, about 6", drop the bulb in the hole and then cover it up.  You can plant a bunch of bulbs in a hurry this way although this bed was a little difficult since the top 1/2" of the mulch was still frozen solid due to a cold snap we had last week.  Nonetheless, it went pretty quick.  

While I'm talking about still frozen mulch and the cold snap we had last week just look at this nonsense:

Stupid dandelion in the lawn!  Temperatures were in the upper teens and twenties several nights last week and yet this stupid dandelion blooms on the first day the temperature exceeds 50.  How do we ever keep these things from coming up?  They're like cockroaches in the yard and I suspect that if we ever have a nuclear holocaust, heaven forbid, the only things left alive will be cockroaches and dandelions!  Sheesh!!!  Here's a little tip for you by the way.  If you see a yellow dandelion pick it before it becomes a little puffball. The puffballs are the seeds and if you pick the yellow flowers you'll keep these things from spreading.  Still a good dose of pre-emergent before March 1 and an application of weed and feed in late March can keep them in check as well.

Gardening as a Contact Sport

Like just about every job I do in the yard there was a minor incident which prolonged the work.  I got almost all the bulbs planted and my planting tool broke.  Well, actually I broke it due to misuse.  I hit a couple of big tree roots with my spade but didn't really notice that I had bent the blade.  It suddenly wasn't digging well so naturally I just pounded it into the ground harder.  I finally noticed that one of the roots had bent the blade, took the thing to the garage and tried to straighten it back out.  You see the results above, the blade just snapped off when I tried to bend it.  Such is life.  I had to finish with my shovel but luckily I only had a few bulbs left.

Baxter eventually got tired of directing me and decided to stand watch to make certain no one bothered us.  I had to say he did a pretty good job!  Nobody snuck up on us and bothered us.  Bulbs were planted successfully.  And nobody got hurt in spite of the damage incurred by my planting spade.  Good job Baxter! Hopefully we'll have some great early spring color in our landscape come late February or March.  I'll post some pics when the time comes.  Another job well done Baxter.  Let's go get your dog biscuit.

Over and out!