EP146 Autumn Planting Bulbs For Spring Colour

In this weeks episode John chats all about Autumn planting bulbs for beautiful blooms next spring. 

Autumn planting/ spring flowering bulbs really are a gardeners dream for many reasons including

• They add colour and lift your mood when not much else is flowering.
• Can be planted in the ground or in containers.
• When you chose your varieties well you can have flower from Jan to May.
• Many will naturalise and spread so the 10 you plant this year will become 15 next year and increase the impact year on year. 
• You don't need to have gardening experience to be successful with them 
• Colours and styles for all situations and gardens. 
• They signal the end of winter and highlight the hope of spring
• Bulbs are inexpensive for the impact they provide.
• Colour schemes can be easily chosen 

So as you can see there are so many reasons to grow bulbs so get out there and get growing. 

There will be a blog post on this episode very soon on my website. This blog and previous blogs along with all podcast episodes are be available on my
Website :https://mastermygarden.com/

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Until next week 
Happy Gardening 
John 

Chapters

• 0:13 Planting Bulbs for Colorful Impact
• 12:37 Planting Bulbs for Maximum Impact
• 22:37 Lasagna Planting With Bulbs

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:13

How's it going, everybody, and welcome to episode 146 of the Master MacGarden podcast. Now, this week's episode we're going to talk about autumn planting bulbs. So autumn planting bulbs are for spring flowering and obviously then we have spring planting bulbs for summer flowering. And bulbs we've mentioned them so many times on the podcast about how easy they are and how they give you I suppose they give you such a great impact of colour over a long period of time for very, very little input and I suppose a lot of gardeners well, all the great gardeners use them anyway. But if you're a total novice, there really isn't too much that you can do wrong when planting bulbs and I think that's why people find them. So they're so easy. But they also make such a big impact and they can have that impact without you having any great gardening experience, so everybody can do it and everyone can get involved in it. Then, as I say, a lot of the open gardens or I could say the majority of the open gardens are using tulips as part of their planting schemes, and there the tulips are what tulips and daffodils and our sisai that's what's given the early season colour in a lot of the open gardens, and so they use them in a big way to give that huge impact through the earlier months where maybe a lot of the other perennial stuff is only starting to come up and you don't have very much else in terms of colour. So you can make a huge impact with them. They're versatile in that if you have a large garden, you have endless possibilities for planting outside, and if you're working with a small space or a courtyard, like we spoke about a couple of weeks ago with Hugh Cassidy in episode 138 you haven't checked out that one that's worth checking back on because, again, it's not specifically about bulbs, but we do talk about bulbs quite a bit. So that episode was about container planting. So if you're in a small space, bulbs in containers can have a huge impact, particularly during those early months of the year where a lot of other things won't give you colour and, as I say, you can be really, really successful with having very, very little experience.

Speaker 1: 2:35

Then there's two other episodes actually that I covered bulbs in. You know previously, episode very, very early days episodes Episode 31, which was with Adam Green from Cologne, ardurd, and Adam is a daffodil grower down in County Waterford and we speak all about daffodils in that episode. And then episode 36 with Ann Verdoes from Ible, and predominantly in that episode we were talking about tulips. So there are a couple of episodes if you're new to the podcast you can go back and check out those and they're specifically about bulbs. So bulbs, as I say, given a long period of flowering. You know, with the right selection of bulbs you can have flower essentially from January. I know in some cases there might be some daffodils that are earlier in that at certain times of the year, but you can have flowering from January right through to the end of May, with choosing the right plants or the right bulbs and using different combinations to give you that flower over a long period of time.

Speaker 1: 3:46

One of the best attributes of bulbs, obviously they give you a great impact of color when there's not much else out there. In terms of color, they're also particularly things like crocuses and bluebells. They're early season food for pollinators, which is also another great benefit of them. But on top of that then you can get a lot of them which are naturalizing, and naturalizing means that they're going to multiply and spread. And again, I think most people are probably familiar with this. But if you're not, for example, if you buy certain types of daffodils or some of the snow drops, bluebells, and you plant 20 bulbs this autumn. By next year that will have multiplied up to 30. But the following year it'll be up to, you know, heading for 50. And that will keep multiplying, keep multiplying year on year and you'll have more impact in the area where you've planted them, but you'll also be able to lift them and move them to the other areas of the garden to spread the interest across the garden. So there's not many things that you'll buy, you know, across anything, you know that you'll get, as and all the time it's multiplying and getting better and getting bigger, the majority of stuff that we consume or purchase, once you buy it it's decreasing in value and it's, you know, work less than the day you bought it. But a lot of plants, particularly bulbs, you cannot say that of because you're buying them and they're actually multiplying in the ground. So for that reason, bulbs, you know they really are, they really are a fantastic, easy, simple way to have an impact and to make an impact and that's why they're so popular.

Speaker 1: 5:38

So, autumn planting bulbs then, like there's a, there's a large range and, as I say, with the, with the correct type of planting and planting. You can have both. You know good flower right through from from January through to the end of May and during this window you know the the flowers that we're talking about. They range from bluebells to alliums to crocus, tulips, fritillarius, snow drops, defidants and arsissae, irises, hyacinths, muscaris, lilies which you can also plant them in the springtime bluebells, muscari and enemies, and just probably a few more as well, but all the main bulbs that you. You know it is the main planting season for bulbs. So obviously we have spring planting. In the spring we're talking about things like you know, tubers, begonias, again lilies. At that time of the year you can plant dahlias, you know that sort of thing, but at this time of the year this is not the main bulb season.

Speaker 1: 6:44

And no-transcript not going to get into individual varieties, I suppose. But what we're going to look at is the rules of thumb for planting, maybe spacing a little bit, planting depth and those type of things, and that will set you up to have success with it. But as I said earlier, really and truly the majority of people can have success and do have success from bulbs. So I suppose the golden rule at home with bulbs is they don't like to be waterlogged or to sit in wet, either in wet soil or wet compost. So, generally speaking, outside, if you have areas that are relatively free draining, they'll do quite well. They don't like, as I say, waterlogged soil. Because if you can imagine, especially for that early stages of establishment, if you can imagine you're planting a bulb into the ground effectively that is going to sit there for, say, if it goes in in October, september, october, november, you're looking at three, four months before there's sort of any growth happening. But in the meantime if it's sitting in moisture, heavy moisture it can rot the bulb and a lot of time. If you do that, they'll just rot away during the winter and you won't have anything in the springtime. So just watch for that. That's. The only thing that you have a problem with really is that if you plant them into either ground that's too wet or into pots that are just waterlogged or not draining or whatever. So just watch that.

Speaker 1: 8:20

The other kind of rule of thumb and it varies slightly from different on the different bulb types, but a rule of thumb is to plant the bulb three to four times the depth of the actual bulb. So if you can picture a crocus bulb, really really small, maybe a couple of times the size of a pea, and you're going to get that at its height, maximum height, and you're going to plant it about three to four times the depth of that and that kind of rings now, or rings true for all the rest of them. So the same with daffodils, same with tulips roughly speaking, three to four times the depth of the bulb is a rule of thumb. If you're going into pots, as many of you will, and definitely it's worth doing, particularly with tulips just watch that you have plenty of depth in the pot. It's something that I often see that someone plants tulips into a shallow, you know, like a shallow bowl, and they don't generally like that. So some of the, some of the little miniature ones, okay, you might get away with it. But generally speaking, for tulips, for any of the taller type tulips, you're going to need a deep pot, and by deep I mean something that's, you know, kind of maybe 30 centimeters high, at a minimum, 40, 50, better, but that's our, that's our the height, so you have a good bit of height in it. And, from a growing media perspective, because we're saying we don't want to leave them sitting in in moisture, we don't want to have them in heavy ground, in heavy, in heavy compost, heavy growing media.

Speaker 1: 10:00

What you're looking for is a mix that has some grit mixed through it so you might use, you know, sort of topsoil mixed with good quality compost, maybe a bit of farm yard manure. Farm yard manure is not essential in it because a lot of what the bulk need is actually inside in it. So all of the energy, all of the food is already built into that bulk. So something like farm yard manure is not essential for the first year's flowering. But why I say you can add it in is that it will help for the second year. So you get good leafy growth and then when it dies back down, that's your energy for the following year. So for that reason, topsoil, farm yard manure, a good quality compost, and then mixing grit through that and in terms of ratios definitely in terms of bulbs, you would go for about a quarter of the mix will be great. So that'll add and that's the whole way through. So mix it up in a, in a trog or in a wheelbarrow beforehand and then fill your pots and that gives you that sort of airy, free draining growing meat that the bulbs are going to need, and that is the same for all bulbs. So by doing that, you're sort of ensuring that they have the best environment for growing.

Speaker 1: 11:16

As I said already, just watch that if you're, if you're using something like tulips, that you have a deep, a deep pot In terms of how many to plant, it's as well as there's a few kind of golden rules here again, don't be afraid of putting in a good few. Roughly speaking, you don't want the bulbs, so you're planting into the ground or you're planting into pots. You don't want the bulbs touching off on it or, as in, they're that close that they're literally side by side within the pot. So a rule of thumb for something like tulips if you have, say, a 30 centimeter pot, then the maximum you're going to put in there is about 15. If you have a 40 centimeter pot, the maximum would be 20. So, roughly speaking, as you can see there, if you have 30 centimeters, then you're going to put in about half inch tulips of 15, 40 centimeter, 20, 50 centimeter, 25. So, whatever the diameter of your pot in centimeters, you're going to put in about half of that in, for example, tulips, and that's a rough going growing guide. But don't put them literally that they're touching off on it or so they need that little bit of space within. But you can put quite a few in there, but just not put them side by side.

Speaker 1: 12:37

If you're planting out into a lawn or into a bed, a lot of people will, you know, sometimes they'll go and they'll drop in a ball up here and there. You generally get very little and sometimes no impact from that. So if you're doing planting outside, plant them in blocks, in groups. So dig a hole. If it's tulips, narcissi, daffodils, iruses, crocus, whatever it is, then plant them in little groups and that will give you you know, that will give you a bigger impact in year one and, as I said, then a lot of them will naturalise Tulips. Then just to, I suppose, to talk about that. As I said, I'm not going to get into individual varieties because, to be honest with you, there is so many and if you go to any Goat Garden Centre or any of the good online sellers of bulbs, you will see literally across the ones that were mentioned in thousands of varieties. Just when you're choosing your varieties, just watch for flowering periods so that you're getting early mid-season and late-season interest and that will ensure that you'll have colour for a long period of time.

Speaker 1: 13:51

When you look at tulips then there's so many different, I suppose, types of tulips you have. You know, single early, single late. You have triumph. You have parrot, double early, double late, greggy eyes, lily flowering, and there's just so many different types of tulips and a lot of them are nice, but a lot of them for me I don't love. I don't like the parrot ones, for example. They're kind of a fluffy flower. I don't really like them.

Speaker 1: 14:26

Generally speaking, tulips are bred to be. You know, it's all about the first season. Now, the majority that you'll buy, you'll get a great flower in year one and then if you leave them in the potter, in the ground, by year two they'll be greatly reduced, and by year three they'll be reduced further and maybe by year four they'll be nonexistent. You can sort of, I suppose, save them a little bit. So after they have flowered and the flowers finished, you remove the flower head and then let them you can give them a feed at that stage let them fully dye back down. And when they're completely dyed back down and dried out, then you can remove them and store them the same way as you would store daedonus, so taking off all the soil and keeping them dry and then replanting them again the following season, and that will give you you know it will help you to, I suppose get more longevity out of your tulips. But if you want to be sure of that, use some of the species tulips, and that's what I plant here. I plant apple dorms. They're species tulip. They're shorter growing generally than you know a lot of the big, tall ones and they just come back year after year and when you naturalize you leave them in the ground and they'll just keep coming back and keep coming back and for me I just don't have the time or the inclination to go digging them up. So I want months that are just going to keep coming back and keep giving all along To run through the list of bulbs then.

Speaker 1: 16:03

So bluebells if you're in Ireland you know there's a lot of bluebells that you'll get on sale. Just for me personally, always try and look for the non-scriptus. They're the traditional Irish stroke English variety and they're the ones that are native to here. So I would go with those ones. The ones that you see quite a lot of are Spanish bluebell. It's a good bit taller. It's still nice enough, good bit taller but it's a bit a little bit aggressive so can spread a little bit too much and can be a bit too leafy as well. It can take over an area. So I just think that the original non-script English stroke Irish ones are a better bulb. And then you have allium switcher. You're part of the onion family. You can get some really nice ones there. You've gladiator and you've globe master with really big heads on it. When it's a big purple flowering head on it, they're really nice.

Speaker 1: 17:06

Again, plant them in blocks, can be used with pots if you're using them in pots that are quite tall. So just make sure then that you're planting something around the base so you can plant things like some types of perennials, like the licks of the hosta around the base and things like that, and that'll give you that sort of color the whole way up. And then the flower above the canopy of the leaves Crocus is dead. As I say, brilliant one for early season food for pollinators, flowering quite early. So that's giving you a flower in February and into March. Again, these naturalize. So really really good to spread, to naturalize an area, and then, if you want to, afterwards, after a couple years and you've built up the stock, you can actually move them to other areas. Excellent pots as well. Use this part of lasagna planting and we'll talk about that in a few minutes time.

Speaker 1: 17:57

And then tulips, again just watching out that you're choosing varieties. Well, with them all, you're looking for choosing varieties that are going to give you sort of interest across all the seasons. You know, if you go out and you buy some daffodils, some tulips and you know three or four different types of bulbs, just try and check out what the flowering period is so that you're getting a bit of longevity in that. Snowdrops, they need to be planted in the earlier part of the autumn season, so late August into September. After that don't really recommend snowdrops after that. But a better time of the year to do snowdrops Now they'll be successful from bulbs. But a better time of the year and a more successful time of the year to do it is in the spring time and at that stage you're planting them in the green, as they call them, and we've spoken about previously on one of the podcast episodes with Robert from Altamute Gardens where we talked about the snowdrop festival and we talked about planting in the green at that stage. So you know there's two options for doing that. But just watch that. You need to do that in the earlier part of the season. So now we're in the middle of October, I personally wouldn't be going so on. Snowdrops from bulbs at this stage of the year.

Speaker 1: 19:09

Daffodils and our sis ice daffodils again, you have so many different flowering like you can get these flowering from middle of December right through to Maytime. So different varieties, a lot of them with different heights, and there's so many beautiful ones out there. Obviously there's the, there's the bog standard trumpet ones, the yellow color, but you can get them now with white eyes, pink eyes and the color that seems to be all in at the moment. But I particularly don't like it is the kind of salmony colored or pinky colored ones I really don't like. So don't know why, and just I don't know. They're a bit in sippid, I think, but they're, they're all in at the moment.

Speaker 1: 19:48

You see a lot of them about Narcissus then are, you know, tend to be miniature type ones, and these are brilliant for pots and so on. So varieties like Tette a Tette Jetfire is a beautiful one. Rip Van Winkle is a sort of an unusual one. You'll either love it or hate it. They're all really good for pots, really good for for beds and borders near the front because they're quite small, but they create a lot of impact in little, little small, little small flowering bunches, I guess.

Speaker 1: 20:22

Hyacinth, then I suppose everyone knows them. For me hyacinth look best when planted well, either with a good block of them in a pot or a planter, or planted on mass outside. I don't like them sort of individually. I think they need to be in a block. If you have them in the block, I think they're beautiful A little bit, a little bit tender as well. You know, if you get really heavy, railing can get the flowers, can get a bit battered on them as well, but they do have a big impact and just not a massive fan personally, but yeah, a lot of people love them and it would be hugely popular.

Speaker 1: 20:58

Muscari, another really good one, very good for naturalizing, ideal on the sort of edge of, you know, a woody type area or woodland area that you might have. Really good for that and, as I say, naturalizing. So they're going to spread and naturalize in that area and Bluebell's mentioned already so like there's lots of different types at this stage of the year, as we mentioned in episode 138 with Hugh Cassidy, I suppose lasagna planting is all in vogue at the moment and you'll see videos and you'll see pictures and you'll see all of this descriptions as to how to do it and so on. And essentially it is really simple. It's as the name suggests and as you would with the food lasagna it's layering basically. So you're layering the different bulbs in the pot. Now, sometimes, when you see, I suppose, what you call recipes for bulb planting lasagnas, you can see up to five, six different types of bulbs in it and I think that's completely overkill and I also think that you end up with too much leaf, so as the flower has finished, the leaves are still there and you end up with a lot of kind of as we mentioned in episode 138, a lot of kind of crappy growth around the outside. So I always think, if you're going down the route of lasagna planting, to go for maybe tree maximum of tree in it, and if you're going for tree, you're going with tulips, daffodils and crocus as being the best ones for that.

Speaker 1: 22:37

Again, this is in a pot now. Your mix is sort of three quarters to one quarter grit, so good quality growing media to one quarter grit. You again are looking for a deep pot, so it has to be sort of more than 30 centimeters deep, but I will go deeper for lasagna planting. And then you're going to put a little bit of grit in the bottom of the pot as well, and then you're going to fill up the compost, so about maybe a quarter to a third of the way up, and then the first layer you're going to go with is your tulips. Then you're going to layer back over with your potting mix again and you're going to have your daffodils on top of that, again, taking care not to have the bulbs touching. It doesn't matter if one happens to be directly above the one below it. They will find their way around and they will come up to the top and then cover back in. And then, on the very top layer, you're going with crocuses, and what ends up happening then is your crocus flowers, then your daffodils are coming and then your tulips are coming and you're getting that continuity of flower, which is a mix like that You're getting from sort of end of February through to Maytime, with a mix of crocus first, daffodil, second, tulip third, and that's a good mix.

Speaker 1: 23:58

Just watch, with your tulips, that, if you're using the tulips, and it's both the same for the daffs that you're using a tall flowering variety. So like, if you're doing crocus, then directly below it you kind of need a good, relatively tall daff and then below that again you need a tall tulip, because if you have the dwarf tulip it's going to come up and it's going to be in the foliage of the daffs. So you want a tall one that's going to come up above the leaf, canopy and flower and put on the show up above that. So watch that you're getting tall flowering, 30 to 40 centimeter daffs and tulips and that's lasagna planting and, yeah, as I say, hugely popular. A lot of people go for it and it really does give a big impact over a long period of time. So it's well worth doing. And yeah, that's kind of the bulbs more of cover.

Speaker 1: 24:52

As I said, not going to go into individual varieties because you couldn't. There is just so many. If you look at any of the garden centers, the bulb websites, there is thousands upon thousands of varieties. So just have a look, see what one suits, you see what's one you like, watch your flowering periods and then choose whatever it is that you're going to go with. Definitely, bring on with tulips and you want them to come back and you want them to be sure of coming back here for species tulips, apple worms and so on.

Speaker 1: 25:24

And other than that, for me personally I like to guess I always like to get naturalising ones that I'm going to have year after year after year. As I say, there's not much you can do wrong with it. They're loved because everybody succeeds with them and I think that's great. And they do give you so much value because they're going to just keep coming, keep giving, keep flowering for years and years to come. And, of course, they can be split up, moved to other parts of your garden or given away to other people to plant in their garden, and that's creating that connection that we spoke about last week. So that's been more or less this week's episode. I'm really cutting it fine this week. I was away with work all week, so it's Thursday night and I'm recording this for release tomorrow morning. It still has to be edited. So, as I say, try not to put myself in this position, but it's kind of happening a little bit lately because I've been quite busy with work, but I've committed to putting it out every week. So, yeah, it's still going out.

Speaker 1: 26:28

I'm currently working on I'll just let you guys know currently working on a Grow your Own Food course. This will be an online course, really, really detailed, covering all, I suppose, food growing topics. So we're going to be covering all the different vegetables, how to sow them, talk about all the things you need, this succession of sowing. We'll talk about sowing times, all of that sort of thing. Going to speak about fruit growing, herbs as well. There'll be a module on herbs and basically anything that you need to grow your own food. Won't matter whether you have a big space to allocate to it or a small space. It'll be suitable for all. The information will be suitable for all. It can be delivered through predominantly video, but some downloadable, you know, for the likes of the sowing guides and so on. That'll be downloadable worksheets and after it, you'll be able to take that information, look at it whenever you want, delve back into it if you need to refresh on something, and it'll be there for whenever you want to look at it as an ongoing resource. As I say, online course, working heavily on it. At the moment not sure exactly when the launch date will be, but, fingers crossed, it'll be sometime before Christmas If you'd like to know more about that or if you'd like to know when it's becoming available, just sign up for my emails.

Speaker 1: 27:57

I don't send them out too often, to be honest with you. I send out probably one a month, or was send them out weekly, but one a month. But if you're signed up there, you'll know exactly when it's coming out and you'll be the first to know about it. So just drop over to my website, wwwmastermcgardencom. Drop in your email address and I will send you information as soon as I have it about the Grow your Own Food course. That's coming out real soon. And yeah, that's pretty much this week's episode. Get Planting your Bulbs. It'll repay you in spades over the next number of years and suitable for everybody. Whether you're in a small garden, big garden, your bulbs are for you. So yeah, as I say, get out there and get planting. So that's been this week's episode. So thanks for listening and until the next time, happy gardening.