Bulbs: Spring Bulbs - What's Blooming? II, 1 by DonnaMack

DonnaMack wrote:
Hi Steve,

What a great analysis of your soil and conditions. When we arrived here we had hardpan (the stuff you get when heavy farm machinery is used for years on the soil - it appears to be rock) covered with the most disgusting yellow clay and with a ph of 7.9. In some places digging four inches would put you right into the clay. As you can imagine, there were no earthworms. I didn't know much, but we have an organic farm on site and in exchange for dumping your clippings and filling your compost bucket and let them collect it, you can take all the finished compost you want. The farm has mostly horses as their "supply" so they need our clippings and scraps to produce good compost.

Since it was free and I just had to lug it, I would take those five gallon containers you buy shrubs in, and every spring and fall I would throw it everywhere. Every time I planted anything I used 80% compost. Now I can dig a foot and a half deep and get lovely soil. I have to be careful, because I have so many earworms that I cannot dig more than two small trowels worth without encoutering what appear to be worm families (two big ones and three or four little ones). Very cool.

As far as tulips, my technique is to dig them up, replace them with, say, glads, then dig up the glads in fall to store them and put the tulips back. I use my "old" tulips randomly through the yard. Here are some four plus year old tulips: Weisse Berliner (a multiflowerd triumph that tends to break into singles), White Trumphinator, Mount Tacoma, and a stray Angelique and Mayfair. I never quite know what's going to come up, which is half the fun.