Garden log 11/20/24. With the freezing temps tonight, I knew I had to get going on finally getting my remaining bulbs in the ground. You can still plant bulbs after temps hit freezing, but at some point, the ground becomes too frozen to work, and then you’re just stuck, and have to go with the plant-in-pots-and-stick-in-basement-or-garage-and-hope method.
I did my daffodils a while ago, but I had tulips left (tulips tend to reduce year after year in our zone, so I’ve taken to planting a few new varieties every year), a few alliums (filling out a bed), some fritillaria meleagris (checkered), some early spring ephemerals: crocus, iphieon (starflower), chionodoxa (glory-of-the-snow), lots of regular snowdrops (nivalis), and a few special (expensive!) varieties that I hope survive — Hippolyta and Polar Star.
If they’re happy here, the snowdrops should spread over time — we’ll see. I really love an extended growing season — I want flowers in the garden all the way from March to November. It helps make Chicago winter more tolerable.
I have no patience for digging individual holes and poking bulbs in — I always dig larger trenches and do a lasagne method, where you put the largest bulbs at the bottom, then some dirt, then medium bulbs, then some dirt, then smaller bulbs, then dirt, then the smallest bulbs. In order to try to deter the squirrels (thankfully, we don’t have deer), I usually sprinkle a generous amount of cayenne over each layer, and that seems to mostly work.
I also rake the leaves off the grass and pile it up over the new bulb plantings. That’s a win-win-win, since that a) clears the grass of the heaviest leaf layer, b) helps hide the disturbed ground from the squirrels, and c) improves our heavy clay soil; if you rake the leaves in every year, after a decade or so, you’ll have wonderful soil to work with.
I can’t complain too much about our clay soil, though, even if it can be hard to dig, because it’s super-conductive, which is making it feasible for us to put in geothermal power at the high school, which I’m very excited about — cost savings + good for the planet!)
In March, I do tend to rake back the areas where I planted the tiny early spring ephemerals, but that’s a small percentage of my yard — most of it, I leave alone until May or so, when the pollinators start waking up, because the daffodils and tulips can push their way through the leaf layer with no trouble.
This was about an hour of work all together? I don’t have that much grass left in the front, so it takes maybe 15 minutes to rake the leaves into the beds. There was one year when I shredded the leaves first, but I stopped bothering with that, and it seems to make no real difference in my yard. (If you have a very heavy leaf layer, you might want to shred, though.)
