the bulb catalogs are here
The bulb catalogs started arriving in the mail, which gives me about a month to plan for next spring. Probably more. If you plant spring bulbs before the weather cools down for good they tend to sprout in the fall and spend their energy reserves on producing doomed foliage instead of storing it to feed bloom in spring.
Almost all bulbs, with the exception of daffodils, are food delicacies for wildlife during the long winter months. Either cover them with a mesh before you bury them, or plant twice as many. Of course I’m not sold on the daffodil bulbs being bitter either, because something must happen to them between the time I plant them in large numbers and the time they never come out of the ground.
Don’t forget to sprinkle a good helping of bone meal in the planting holes and plant bulbs in groups of five or six – they look better in the landscape and are happier among their kin.
General gardening practice recommends replacing bulbs every three years, because they exhaust their food reserves and stop blooming after that. I’m not sure that is necessarily true, but I never got to worry about the bulbs exhausting themselves, the squirrels always get to them before that, so I guess the three year replacement cycle is more like a yearly replacement cycle.
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