Hole-making Guy

Narcissus "Poeticus" bulbIt is not too late to plant bulbs. The ground is not frozen yet. We planted some on Christmas Eve one year, and they came up just fine. My wife bought a thousand Narcissus bulbs – they are the “Poeticus” type, with the orange rim on the corolla, apparently a variety called Pheasant's Eye – from the Dutch-American grower Van Bourgondien. According to the company’s website they begin selling bulbs in mid-September and don’t stop shipping them out until just before Thanksgiving. I had already begun putting ours in the ground a week before Thanksgiving.

Our “ground” is fairly miserable stuff in places. This property has been re-graded, dug up and generally moved around repeatedly in the 155 years since the first part of the house was built. There is probably a bedrock core of shale and siltstone to the ridge that we are on, but it is heavily draped with glacial lake sediments. They are lake sediments and not moraine because they are layered, a sure sign that they were deposited in a standing water body of some size.

Just down the street from us there is a large 40-year old cut in the hill. The state re-routed and widened the highway in 1961, leaving a steep slope between “Old Main” Street and the new Main Street. There are wet spots on this hillside that are distinctively linear; groundwater percolates downward to clay layers and then moves laterally to the surface.

The same thing happens in our yard nearer the top of the hill. In both locations sedges grow on seeps that continually dampen the banks of the hill. We have Sphagnum moss growing at many places in the lawn. I will avoid planting bulbs in those areas on our property because they would simply rot in the ground. In addition to the sedges, lovers of ‘wet feet’ like rushes and Joe-Pye weed have also marked these sodden areas, which will help me avoid them.

Expectant hole awaits bulbsMy wife told me to dig holes to a depth three times the height of the bulbs. They are generally about 4 inches high, so my excavations are on the order of a foot deep. This is not as easy as it sounds. There are Norway maples along the tree lawn between the street and the sidewalk at our west-facing yard. All maples are notoriously shallow rooted, and to me Norways have always seemed to be the most enthusiastic producers of roots. After beginning my first hole with a spade, I had to go get a “grub ax.” It is, in fact, the only ax we own because the only thing I ever need an ax for is to cut tree roots.

Because I am not digging in an area that has been gardened before there are also a lot of rocks to be found. Interestingly they are a mixture of fairly fresh pieces of “ledge” and glacial cobbles. Ledge is what I was taught to call bedrock that is near the surface and gets in the way of digging holes. Excavators of foundations, wells and other practical structures dislike ledge. Geologists more fondly refer to the same rock as “outcrop.”

However you regard it ledge pieces are broken raggedly around the edges because they have never been transported anywhere by running water or glacial ice. Creeks and rivers tumble rocks until they are smooth. Even wave action on a beach rolls rock until the edgelessly oblong.

Glacial ice is plastic and pliable, enclosing rocks in its maw and dragging them along the landscape, sanding flat surfaces into their sides, and then flipping them around repeatedly as they grind inexorably forward. As a result glacial cobbles are shaped like little boats with a prow, a keel and a rounded stern, regardless of lithology.

I pulled large numbers of both of these classes of rock out of my bulb holes, occasionally interrupted by the severing of roots. Initially my holes were circular, but gradually – as I imagined the overall effect of the spring display – I lengthened them into trenches and gave some thought as to how they were oriented one to the other. At the same time I had to avoid the patches of ferns that we have planted in there over the past couple of years.

At one end of the area the periwinkle (Vinca) is simply too thick to cut through with leaving unsightly holes. This late in the season I figured that I would kill whatever I dug up (it is evergreen) and to be honest I like the look of the thick, shiny green blanket of leaves and its lavender flowers in the summer.

Bulbs in placeI dug a bit deeper than a foot and then replaced some of the soil, bringing some of the more organic-rich stuff to depth giving the bulbs something soft to sit in and grow their roots into. I didn’t add any “amendments.” My mother used to but bone meal in with her tulips, but I don’t remember her doing it with daffodils. And one of my neighbors told me (while I was out there planting) that squirrels had dug up her bulbs, and she believed that they could smell the bone meal and other amendments she put in there. In any case, amendment-less plantings have come up pretty well here in the past.

I now have 475 of the 1000 in the ground and it is the week after Thanksgiving. I will be getting the rest in holes in our meadow garden through this week. It should go faster because I always get the hang of a manual task again as I go along and also, there are fewer tree roots over there.


Note: After writing the above I went out and planted another 275 bulbs, so now I have 250 to go, which I hope to get to tomorrow.

Comments

[MrFishscales]

Sadly the spring of 2011 was the wettest on record and nearly all of these bulbs rotted in the ground.