Northeast Gardening: Bulb season's almost here. What are you planting?, 1 by pirl

pirl wrote:
What a fun thread. I've been out in the garden too long and somehow missed it.

I can't associate names with answers floating in my head but here goes:

Perennial tulips are Darwins (per Dutch Gardens) and they do return year after year. I added another package each year because I didn't believe they'd return: glad to say I was wrong.

The lovely Angelique (peony flowering) was delightful for the first year, then never again.

Does anyone ever listen to Ralph Snodsmith on WOR radio, 710 on your dial, Sunday mornings from 8 to 10? He was the director of the Queens Botanical Gardens for many, many years and they'd plant 250,000 tulips each fall and each spring, after flowering, they'd dig them up and compost them. Tulips are, as he says, "not reliably hardy".

I do plant mine 2" deeper than the package calls for and now have stopped adding to that bed.

Purple Allium Sensation - I was planting them about five years ago (bought them at half price in December) as I froze and misread the directions so I used my auger and went down 20". When I brought the package inside I saw my error and did go back out to dig them up and replant. They've done fine and I just took them up to replant and now have 19 from about a dozen I planted originally.

The big event last week was lifting a clump of daffodils that were originally planted in 1993: 52 pound clump (including soil) and 93 bulbs! So far I've replanted 39 of them.

I had lifted another clump, two weeks ago, and sent 84 to a DG person, gave 84 to a local friend and still have a lot to replant.

Ralph Snodsmith's advice on fertilizing bulbs is to do it when the first tips appear in springtime.

Ours had pushed both upward and downward in the soil but we didn't have the blooms you'd have expected from these numbers of bulbs. There is one more clump to be dug but it just might not happen this fall.

Long ago, in a former home, I did a fall planting of 1,069 bulbs down the side of the driveway and 144 daffodils in a separate bed: what a lovely spring I had! The new people ripped them all out = knife in the heart.

Dave - loved your allium line!