Wednesday, November 11, 2015

Still more bulbs

I finally finished planting all the darned bulbs today. And I finished my map of where they are - they're in the red spots.


My dad was here over the last several days and he voluntarily did a lot of raking! But there are still...so...many...leaves. I keep making trips to the dump with them.


Look how gorgeous the Japanese maple is in the background!


Sunday, November 1, 2015

More bulbs

Planting bulbs has been harder work than I anticipated, because I am battling rocks and roots and finding things like shards of glass in the soil.

Today I wanted to put the tulip bulbs in the front, close the the garage, where I think the deer are least likely to go. I was digging and in addition to a crazy number of rocks, there were enormous chunks of concrete down there, clearly having been used as filler by the guys who worked on the garage. Removing them took a lot of effort, but I did it, and stuck the bulbs in as deep as I could (probably about a foot), having read that planting them deep (ideally about 20") increases their chances of coming up multiple years in a row. I had always thought of tulips as perennials and was surprised to read recently that a lot of them only come up once, then die due to suffering from too much moisture or other bad conditions. And indeed, that has happened to me; but I thought it was just my bad luck.

This is where the tulips went


I still have a lot of bulbs left to plant! My arms ache at the prospect, but the weather is supposed to be lovely this week and I don't have too much work on my plate, so I'll get it done.

A bee found my plot of the property (still in progress) a nice resting spot. It was sluggish and I blew it off the paper and into the chrysanthemum.



After planting, Emma and I went in back to look for fairies.