Digging In the Dirt
Mar. 22nd, 2009 08:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
akirluWell, I have no idea if this will work, but I thought it was worth a try.
Back when it was still bulb planting season this fall, I bought some bulbs. I had the very best of intentions. But stuff and things happened, not least being that we had an exceptionally crappy late fall and early winter and then it came December and it started to SNOW. And so I did not plant my bulbs in fall.
Yesterday we finally had a weekend where I didn't have a crapload of stuff that needed doing for Corflu and I had no meetings to go to and it was neither freezing or raining, and so I finally got out in the yard to try to clean up some of the residue of charitably hiring an itinerant begging gardener last fall. (Paying money to have someone else leave a giant mess in my back yard is the outside of enough but that's a rant for another day, aside from being one of the reasons I never got my bulbs in the ground last fall -- I'd look at the pile of debris from the felled holly and just turn back into the house.) I made reasonable progress on cutting back the big pink rose in the front, and I rediscovered my bag of bulbs in the shed. They've started sprouting, and the sprouts are rather pallid, but they look viable, as yet.
So yesterday evening I pulled out the Grandpa's Weeder (tm) and my Japanese weeding knife that looks like it's meant to be something for dispatching unruly ninjas with (made worse by the fact that there's a cute cartoonish bunny eating carrots stamped into the blade, as if what it's really for is dispatching cute, carrot-thieving bunnies) and went out with my bag of grape hyacinth bulbs into the side yard, and began uprooting dandelions, of which we have rather a lot.
The Grandpa's (tm) weeder (if applied correctly, which is sometimes a bit of guesswork) grabs the whole root of the weed and rips it bodily out of the ground, leaving behind a hole where the weed used to be. The holes tend to be about 3/4" across and maybe 2" deep, so perhaps not ideal depth for dropping a small bulb into, but maybe passable. And so I went along with my weeding tools, pulling up weeds, and then dropping grape hyacinth bulbs into the hole and patting back some of the soil the weeder ripped out with the root.
I have no idea how many of them will survive and prosper, but I'm hoping some of them will. One of the neighbors has a disused patch of lawn where the grass is allowed to grow long, and in spring the patch goes purple blue with grape hyacinth, or some other little bluish bulb flower and it looks wonderfully sylvan and lush. I want such a patch, and we don't do anything with the north side yard except let the weeds grow. So here's hoping at least some of my poor neglected bulbs take.
Back when it was still bulb planting season this fall, I bought some bulbs. I had the very best of intentions. But stuff and things happened, not least being that we had an exceptionally crappy late fall and early winter and then it came December and it started to SNOW. And so I did not plant my bulbs in fall.
Yesterday we finally had a weekend where I didn't have a crapload of stuff that needed doing for Corflu and I had no meetings to go to and it was neither freezing or raining, and so I finally got out in the yard to try to clean up some of the residue of charitably hiring an itinerant begging gardener last fall. (Paying money to have someone else leave a giant mess in my back yard is the outside of enough but that's a rant for another day, aside from being one of the reasons I never got my bulbs in the ground last fall -- I'd look at the pile of debris from the felled holly and just turn back into the house.) I made reasonable progress on cutting back the big pink rose in the front, and I rediscovered my bag of bulbs in the shed. They've started sprouting, and the sprouts are rather pallid, but they look viable, as yet.
So yesterday evening I pulled out the Grandpa's Weeder (tm) and my Japanese weeding knife that looks like it's meant to be something for dispatching unruly ninjas with (made worse by the fact that there's a cute cartoonish bunny eating carrots stamped into the blade, as if what it's really for is dispatching cute, carrot-thieving bunnies) and went out with my bag of grape hyacinth bulbs into the side yard, and began uprooting dandelions, of which we have rather a lot.
The Grandpa's (tm) weeder (if applied correctly, which is sometimes a bit of guesswork) grabs the whole root of the weed and rips it bodily out of the ground, leaving behind a hole where the weed used to be. The holes tend to be about 3/4" across and maybe 2" deep, so perhaps not ideal depth for dropping a small bulb into, but maybe passable. And so I went along with my weeding tools, pulling up weeds, and then dropping grape hyacinth bulbs into the hole and patting back some of the soil the weeder ripped out with the root.
I have no idea how many of them will survive and prosper, but I'm hoping some of them will. One of the neighbors has a disused patch of lawn where the grass is allowed to grow long, and in spring the patch goes purple blue with grape hyacinth, or some other little bluish bulb flower and it looks wonderfully sylvan and lush. I want such a patch, and we don't do anything with the north side yard except let the weeds grow. So here's hoping at least some of my poor neglected bulbs take.
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