There are more lovely flowering bulbs beginning coming from our nothern friends' garden! Woohoo! Steve, those blossoms belong to my 'Toyo Nishinki' quince. The common red blooms flowering quince were very early, they're all spent now, but this hybrid quince just now showing its best color. It first opens creamy white, then deepened with pink blush. The shot make the flower appear bigger than its actual size, it's but roughly 1.5" across I think. I love these.
Steve-
My "hat is off" to you...
I know the rest of the world can grow tulips, but I had decided here in North Texas that it was a complete impossibility, and waste of money...
One Fall I bought over 100 angelique tulips...
I never saw them again, past the day I spent all that time planting them, lol...
What is the "secret" to getting tulips to come back in Texas? Are yours planted in our native soil, or a complete soil overhaul? How deep?
Maybe I needed to plant them more shallowly, or add sand? I thought we didn't get cold enough, either...
So many questions, but you are obviously the guy to ask! :0)
I adore those orange/pink tulips in the first few pictures...*sigh
Oh, and I've killed crocus over and over, too...hyacinth do ok for me for a few years, then peter out in a slow decline...
Gladiolas, Sparaxsis, and spanish bluebells have done well for me, though...and clivias(are they a bulb?, lol)...and I've learned the trick to peonies(another one that I see that you grow, but we aren't "supposed" to be able to grow here)
-Taylor
Ahh, this thread gives me hope for things to come.
until then, I have a single little crocus bud:
There we go! More beauties are coming along!
Taylor, I've a pot of Clevias which hasn't flowers in two consecutive seasons, how did yours bloom so beautifully?
Lily-
I never knew they could grow in the ground here in zone 8a, until I saw them planted in mass, in the ground at the local conservatory. The lady that was in charge told me they were perfectly hardy here, and bloomed best when they had a cold, dormant period.
I took her advice(wincing the entire time, thinking I'd kill mine), but she was right :0) They die back to the ground, and then emerge with nice new green foliage...and then voila! gorgeous blooms. Maybe since you are in a colder zone, you could store yours in the garage for the winter, like many people do with brugmansias?
It is the cold dormant spell that causes the blooms. I've noticed that with orchids, too...I keep mine in a cold greenhouse that gets as low as 32 before the heat gets turned on, and have glorious blooms each Spring...before that they never bloomed for me past the original bloom
Taylor, That is too cool to learn that clivia will grow outdoors here in zone 8a. I have a beautiful one that I have in a pot. I left it out during a freeze, and it lost all it's leaves, but it appears to still be alive. Maybe there's hope for it yet. I'll be sure to get it in the ground before next winter! I love clivias!
Sarah
Hi Taylor,
Well a lot of what I do is based on experimentation and finding out what works. I am certainly no expert but I read a lot and experiment a lot. I have found there are a lot of myths here in Texas. I think many peope think the issue is always the heat/climate when something struggles and I have found it is far more often the soil. When I first moved here from Illinois 10 years ago, I went to Home Depot and picked up some bags of various spring bulbs - mostly hyacinths and daffodils. The guy who worked there who saw me getting them off the rack told me I need to refrigerate them or they would not bloom. I did that the first two years until I noticed that, the second year, almost all of the hyacinths and daffodils returned and even some of the tulips. I stopped refrigerating bulbs the third year with the exception of tulips and now plant them directly into the ground - and the hyacinths and daffs bloom just as well as if I had. So I got annoyed with that and other people saying certain plants just wouldn't grow here (based on nothing in the way of fact, really) and throwing their hands up and started playing around, and was surprised at the results. Besides, I think many of the "Texas natives" look like weeds LOL and I have never gotten into them.
I have found the biggest issue in north Texas at least is not the temperatures or the summer heat but our soil. I now live in the Azle area NW of Ft Worth and there seems to be far less clay here and the soil appears to have a much higher sand content than farther to the east and it is noticeable different than at my old place in Ft Worth proper, where the soil was heavy and black gooey clay that had horrible drainage and was hard as a rock during the summer. At that house I built raised beds to compensate for that (about 8" -10" raised) and it made a WORLD of difference in success rates and return. I am lucky that at our new home in Azle the soil arond the house is mostly very pliable and deep around the house and though I amended it to improve the nutritive value, it drains really well and is easy to dig in and work. I plant most large bulbs around 6-8" deep and sometimes even deeper if they are especially large like lily bulbs. Tulips and hyacinths both like to stay dry during the summer and wet, boggy soils will almost certainly mean poor or no return. If you can keep your soil well drained and fairly dry during the summer, I think you'll have far better success. Think about it - that heavy, dense clay soil would be imposible for anything to breathe in which is why many plants struggle with it.
On coming back - I have found lilies and daffodils both return and multiply really well here. I have had GREAT success with most types of lilies and terrific multiplication especially on the Asiatics, OT's, and LA's. Hyacinths have also done really well but remember the stalks get looser and less dense over time for just about everyone and that was true for us up in Illinois as well, but the looser stalks in subsequent years are still very pretty and put on a good show. I don't think most people anywhere get the tight, dense spikes you often see on new bulbs right off the boat from Holland due to special propagation techniques the Dutch growers use to get them that way - but it's not a naturally occurring thing.
Tulips do require significantly more cold to return well than do hyacinths even though lots of peope like to lump the two together, when they shouldn't be. I normally refrigerate tulips for about 8 weeks before intial planting. Non-species tulips are never going to perform as strongly here as they will in northern climates, but I often get a decent return second year though the stalks are somewhat shorter and and the flowers a little smaller. I even have some coming single late tulips back now for a third year though they are smaller yet. So, tulips are not a great perennial choice here as they might be in a colder climate, but if you don't get them to come back past planting and even bloom once, chances are they rotted due to heavy or waterlogged soil. I would plant tulips about 8" deep if your soil is workable to that level. I have noticed that in the area where the tulips are returning, the soil is DRY during summer but not rock-hard. I am now seeing buds on the other side of my bed that I planted in 2007 so I am interested in seeing what the flowers look like.
Congrats on your discovery on the peonies and your success with them also - I love them and just am careful to plant early varieties so they bloom before the heat hits in May. I have had really good luck with those and have seen others in my area with them. I think LilyLove's climate is VERY similar to ours though AL gets more rain.
Sarah-
the only other thing I might mention is that hers were planted under a deciduous tree, and that is where mine are, also. They can't take our full hot texas sun, but do great with bright filtered light under a tree :0)
Also, they need to stay on the drier side in winter. I only water mine in the growing months, but never while dormant...only natural rainfall in winters.
happy clivia growing :0)
Steve-
Thanks for the reply. Yes, the angelique and many others(including some pricey lilies) rotted. We don't have horrible soil, but it is very alkaline, and contains a larger portion of clay than anything else.
Maybe I should experiment on a smaller scale this time(ie: less than 100, lol), and see if I can get them to grow in say~ an urn? That way I could control the soil content and drainage, and then just overplant with decorative perennials...
Does that sound like it might work?
Thanks, GREAT info SteveFtWorth. As a future snowbird in the southern US that is great advice and info. I sure hope you have shared this on the TX forum because I have noticed that many in the south don't even try spring bulbs. (printing Steve's post for my Great Book of Lists for the Southern Garden).
Taylor,
That sounds like an idea that might work :-) Another thing you could try is to find even a small slope or higher area of your yard to plant a small group of tulips to see how they do. I think they'll perform better in the ground than in a container. I have some daffodils in a large pot but no tulips. Your urn idea might work if you protect the urn from too much sun which might heat up the soil. Our soil is horribly alkaline too (I can tell by the wide variety of mushroom colonies that seem to pop up everywhere this time of year!) Let me know how they do!
Steve
dahlianut, are you moving our way???
^_^ Yes Steve we are planning to snowbird Nov-March. Looking for a property along Interstate 10 AZ to NM and around the El Paso area so we'll be west of you good buddy but as retirees: "have feets will travel" ^_^
OK, so you're keeping your house in Alberta - good deal! Well I wish you luck in your search though that is a pretty big range you've chosen! LOL
I will always have to have my dahlias in AB ^_^ Yes is it is a large area but we want to become more familar with it before we narrow it down. We have already scoped out other states and Mexico and we're honing in now. I want to garden and we both want to golf and there are hubs all along that route that will work perfectly for us. oops sorry all OT- back to bulbs. Quick Steve post a pic LOL.
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.
Here is a look at the different heights. I just throw second season bulbs them in a bag and label them by what they peimarily are or as a mix. I now have hundreds of these mixes and throw them everywhere. They look particularly nice amongst the peonies and, well, anywhere I have an empty space. Great for opulence - then I spend my new bucks purchasing other things (like Scott's hyacinths - gotta have them).
Donna
Donna, I grew up knowing an elderly neighbor who did the same thing with his tulips, dug them every spring when he filled the bed with annuals and plopped them back in in fall. They bloomed every year.
I LOVE that curved vine trellis! Beautiful and original looking!
Donna, there's a thread in the Garden Talk forum about trellises and arbors and I posted a link to your post there. It's so nice, I had to make sure those folks see it :-)
http://davesgarden.com/community/forums/t/951160/
Steve, you've given a comprehensive tutoring guide on planting spring bulbs for our southern garden. I worked my bulbs bed similiarly as you did with yours, planted mine Tulips 6-8" deep. The keyword is drainage. Not many plants will tolerate wetfeet, and hardpan growing medium.
DonaM, great job with caring for your Tulips in your climate. Oh how I love your garden setting with the arbor in the background to show off your Tulips grouping. A nice touch!!!
Taylor, thanks for the tips on caring for Clivias, I've a pot of ground orchids, I just learnt that they're hardy in our zone, so after many years having hauling them in and out of the makeshift greenhouse, I'm going to plant them out directly into the well drainage area in the garden along with the Clivias.
Diahlianut, best of lucks with your property-hunting out West. I just returned from New Mexico and I love the beauty out there. Do drop me a line when you get settle. We may can do some gardening project together. lol.
You're gonna love it. It's my neighbor's trellis. They built a really big house to the north of me, a few months after mine, and brought in a garden designer (and their house is gray to my red - we were told what their color would be and planned accordingly). I had been putting in all kinds of things (crabapples, smokebushes, viburnums, fothergillas), and the garden designer turned to them and said - hum - we should really build on her landscaping. So they put together their landscaping to integrate with mine, with lots of hardscaping, and I get to use it as a smashing backdrop.
Another example on the north side. The white pine is theirs, as is the feather reed grass. Great backdrop to my Iceberg last November. I put in a couple of Icebergs because Madame Hardy, to the left, blooms for six weeks in June, but Iceberg carries on for months.
I have a trellis on the south side of my yard, on which I grow Quadra, the Canadian explorer rose, but NOTHING this big.
Thank goodness for people with money and taste to accompany their courtesy!
Donna
That's awesome! Especially when you hear so many stories about issues with neighbors and gardens.
Lily_love-
I am in zone 8a, and you are in 7b...not sure how hardy they are past my zone, only that they are hardy here.
So, we get down to the low 20's,... so maybe when you get below 20, pile some leaves, or drop a cloche over it?...don't want you to lose it on my account :0) Ten degrees might make a difference...
Good thought! Maybe I just devide the Clivias and the ground orchids, test them out, but perserve some, in case mother nature's way be too harsh for those tender plants? LOL.
That's a good idea, better safe than sorry. That's how I experiment with hardiness, take some babies or offsets and try them in a protected spot. Oh if I could grow Clivia in the ground! I do love my potted one, got my first bloom last summer! It has a pup developing nicely; I think I'll pot it into something bigger in hopes of achieving a clump with multiple bloom stalks.
Good plan.
I think a cloche like this would buy you ten degrees...plus it would help deflect the water so that it would stay drier...
I got a couple of these large light fixture thingys at the thrift store, and turned them upside down. Don't know how much they cost to just buy new, but you could use something like this during winter, to help them think they are in zone 8a :0)
gemini-sage, easy does it with the repotting of Clivias, I read somewhere that they like to be potbound in order to bloom well. That's what have done, kept them in a root bound pot. But, then my gh's temp. was kept quite warm 60F. degrees plus most time. Seedpicker, I like your creativity indeed! :-)
Taylor, that is a great idea! I've only ever thought of using cloches for spring frosts, but a vented one that a light fixture creates would give an extra zone's worth of protection I'd think. Hmmm...you're enabling my zone pushing tendencies, LOL. I may just employ that very method for a couple of Abutilon vitifolium I'm curious about- I've read of gardeners overwintering them outside in zone 7.
http://davesgarden.com/guides/pf/go/725/
LilyLove, thanks for the tip on Clivias! I've read that is often the case with plants in the Amaryllis family. For a long time that didn't make sense to me, thinking they wouldn't be confined by a pot in nature, but having grown some for several years now, I see that natural crowding comes from bulblets and offsets.
Neal-
That a. vitifolium in the heronswood picture is gorgeous!
The regular abutilons are hardy for me. I usually plant them in hanging baskets, and leave them out all winter. Supposedly anything planted in a container is considered to experience one zone colder than it would planted in the ground. So, even regular abutilons are hardy to zone 7, according to that logic.
So, with a cloche, and some heat generated by leaf cover and decomposition, you should very well be able to push the zone. I don't care what zone you are in, one always want to push it, lol...
As your vitifolium gets bigger, you could do row covers with those hoop wires and plastic row cover. I used that one year over my citrus, until I found out they were hardy enough here, lol...
Also you can use old discarded windows and doors for great larger cold frames. I called a glass company, and they said they throw these glass doors away daily:
and an entire greenhouse made with sliders
I absolutely love this idea, because you can close it up, or ventilate it in minutes, just by opening, or closing the sliders :0)
This message was edited Mar 12, 2009 2:26 PM
and the permanent setup for growing year round veggies at the Lost gardens of Heligan in Cornwall.
These would be easy to duplicate with some cinderblocks, and old windows
That greenhouse is great! I've got one of each of the Abutilon vitifolium, a white and a blue/lavender, both the sole germinating seeds from their packs (you can imagine how carefully I tended those babies, LOL). They're both big enough to take cuttings from; as I get some rooted I'll send you some if you like them.
Ooo...I've love that...thanks :0)
Where did you get seeds?
By the way...I did email you recently, but maybe the email I had for you is no longer good? I was emailing about roses...I still have a pile for you :0)
-T
I thought of pulling someone's legs and post this pix which I took today. Yes, today, BUT, this isn't what blooming in my garden. lol. I cheated. I couldn't resist these blooms from Lowes. They must have been cued from shipment, some of their leaves may have been burnt or something, they were marked down. So I got some early blooming 'Stargazer' liliums to enjoy this time of year.
Wooohooo, I've some orange Tulips coming along....
gorgeous...what tulip is that one that is orange, with the pink blush to it, in the bottom right hand corner?...so pretty!
SP; I wished I knew, I picked those holland bulbs Tulips from various box stores during the Fall. Though I chose them according to blooming intervals, early, middle, and late blooming varieties. None were named cultivars, just simply mix-Tulips.
They look just like Steve's up above... but I don't think it is 'Dreaming Maid' though. Wish I knew what it is too. Great color for spring.
http://davesgarden.com/community/forums/p.php?pid=6233756
Like I've mentioned before, Steve and I have similiar taste in Flowers and perhaps garden design too. We use the same type of blocks to make our flower beds' borders. lol.
Wow, what a bunch of great posts! Kim, LOL I was just gonna comment about how much I like Donna's curved arbor and then I saw you did and she answered that it was not hers. Donna you're right though, what a terrific backdrop! And I knew you had a red house so was wondering if there was something I had not seen of your landscape. Donna has awesome taste however and wait until she posts her spring/summer photos. Lovely tulip arrangement and I am amazed how good and "natural" it looks considering you dig and replant each year. I am far too lazy for that!
Yes, Kim and I do tend to pick similar planting schemes and you are right about the blocks as well ^_^ Love your tulips and pansies in the bed together, and what a colorful arrangement! Tulips are so spectacular that I have to plant a few dozen each year. Fortunately most of the bulbs I plant seem to be perennial and even the ones that are not are worth replanting.
Pluto yoo are correct it is not Dreaming Maid, it is "Daydream" LOL - I went and looked at my spreadsheet I use to track the bulbs. Good catch!! I knew there was a "dream" in there somewhere however, heheheh. I think LilyLove's (Kim's) might be the same.
Great greenhouse seedpicker - Do you use that mainly for overwintering your plants or winter plant/seed propagation?
