Category: Outdoors

Put a few here and there, or make a big splash of color

As a boy I was surrounded by hundreds of spring daffodils every year. We lived in rural Connecticut, and the people we bought our house from had planted daffodils by the hundreds in our woods. The woods consisted of sugar maples, huge ones, with a sprinkling of ash trees, providing dappled sunshine. We had wide raked paths and all along the paths were daffodils in April and May. We would pick 50 or more at a time and bring them into the house and put them in vases everywhere.

So when I bought my house here in Cornish Flat in 1970, I started planting bulbs, too. Except for my years in Africa with the Peace Corps, I have probably planted some every year for over 50 years. It is now getting tough to find places to plant more, but somehow I manage. One trick I use is to put those little white plant tags pushed almost all the way into the ground (so I see less of them) each time I plant a new batch. That way I don’t inadvertently dig up some while trying to find a blank palette.

The first step is to buy bulbs. My local feed-and-grain store has them, as do garden centers and most grocery stores. You can order bulbs online if you want things beyond the common ones. But I like to try first to buy locally.

Next, find an appropriate place to plant them. If you are planting small, early-spring bulbs like snowdrops or glory of the snow, you can plant them in the lawn. Just poke holes in the sod for them. Their foliage dies back early. But if you plant daffodils or tulips in the lawn, you won’t be able to mow the lawn until their foliage has replenished the energy in the bulbs, which for daffodils is July 4 or thereabouts.

I like to plant a big splash of color in one place. Rather than dig small holes with a trowel or auger, I like to plant a minimum of 25 daffodils or tulips in a wide single hole. To do this, I lay out the bulbs on the ground where I want them, spacing them 3 inches or so apart. I like a planting of bulbs to be an oval or teardrop shape as opposed to a rectangle. That seems more natural, but do whatever pleases you.

Then I take a hand tool and draw a line around the space designated for the bulbs. I remove the bulbs, and dig out the soil. I don’t dump it on the lawn — I put it in a wheelbarrow or on a tarp so I don’t make a mess on the lawn. I discard any stones as I dig.

For depth, follow the directions on the package. Big bulbs like daffodils and tulips generally should be planted at least 6 inches deep. Little things like crocus only need to be 3 inches deep. If I dig down 6 inches, I then add some bulb booster or organic fertilizer in the hole and then loosen the soil for another 2 inches with my CobraHead weeder (or a three-pronged scratcher). If the soil is heavy clay or very sandy, I add a couple of inches of compost and stir that in.

Next I place the bulbs in the hole in a somewhat random pattern, not straight lines. I wiggle the bulbs around so that the base of each bulb is near the bottom of the loosened and enriched soil. Finally, I shovel the soil from the wheelbarrow back into the soil, being careful not to dislodge my bulbs. If the soil is really crummy, I throw some away and mix in compost to replace it. Bulbs need good drainage.

What about hungry animals that want to eat your flowers before you can enjoy them? Squirrels and chipmunks love tulip bulbs and have been known to watch from a distance as gardeners plant them — and dig them up almost right away. Some sources claim that adding sharp crushed oyster shells on top of the soil, or near the top, will deter them. I doubt that. Oyster shells won’t deter a tulip-hungry gray squirrel.

Wire mesh buried in the soil above the bulbs will deter squirrels, however. The problem is that when you cut it to size, the edges are razor-sharp. When I interviewed the White House gardener at the end of the Clinton years, he reported that they kept squirrels away from their bulbs by feeding them all the corn they could eat. A well-fed squirrel won’t bother to dig for tulips, he said. That’s not a good plan, in my view, it will attract more squirrels. I say, if you want tulips, plant them and hope for the best. Having a dog helps, too.

Deer are another problem. Deer love tulip buds and flowers, and will often eat them just before they open. Although there are deer repellent sprays, I think the best solution there is to temporarily surround beds of tulips with wire fencing. Chicken wire comes in 3-foot-wide rolls that can easily be supported with thin stakes and will keep deer away from your tulips.

Lastly, if you want tulips on your table, you might consider buying them. Local greenhouses near me grow them by the thousand and sell them through my local food coop at a fair price in season. Then you can focus your bulb efforts on things that deer and squirrels won’t eat.

The best bulb in deer country is the daffodil. They are mildly poisonous, so squirrels won’t eat the bulbs and deer won’t eat the flowers. There are over a dozen different named categories of daffodils, and a wide range of colors beyond yellow: white, orange, and even some with a green eye, or center. They will bloom early, mid-season or late in the spring. So buy plenty and enjoy a pest-free spring.

Featured photo: Plant with the pointy end up. Photo by Henry Homeyer.

Back in the 1980s the Dartmouth Film Department showed a film by Les Blank called Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers. It was shown in “Smell-o-Rama.” Cooking garlic smells were mysteriously introduced to the air system, filling the 900-seat auditorium with the delicious odor of roasted garlic. I attended, and loved it all. Just for the record, my one mother was better than garlic — but I love garlic, too, and plant plenty of it.
One of my favorite fall appetizers is to take whole heads of garlic and roast them in oven-safe ramekins or small dishes at 375 degrees for 45 minutes or so. I peel off the outer layers of the head of garlic, cut off the tips of the head and drizzle it with olive oil. When done the cloves of garlic are soft and easily squeezed out of their skins after cooling. I like to serve this on crackers or a baguette spread with goat cheese.
In order to have enough garlic for treats like the one described above I plant a lot of garlic each October. Usually I plant about 50 cloves, but I have planted up to 100 — always enough to eat daily and some to share. It really is a virtually work-free, pest-free crop. All you need is “seed” garlic sold for planting, or failing that, some organic garlic purchased at your local farmers market or food coop. Grocery store garlic is often treated with chemicals so it won’t sprout.
In addition to seed garlic you need a sunny place with decent soil, or even crummy soil you can improve with compost. To plant 50 cloves of garlic the space you need is minimal: a spot perhaps 4 feet long and about 3 feet wide. You could even find the space in a flower bed for a few, or on the front lawn around the light pole.
I plant garlic in a wide raised bed. I loosen the soil with a garden fork or my CobraHead weeder down to a depth of 6 inches. Then I add some good-quality compost, either homemade or purchased, and stir it in. I make furrows 8 inches apart and add some organic fertilizer like Pro-Gro into the furrow. I work it in with my single-tined CobraHead weeder. Or you can sneak cloves into a flower bed individually using a hand trowel.
Each clove needs to be planted the way it grew — the fat part down, the pointy end up. I plant cloves about 3 inches deep and a hand’s width apart in the row. After pushing the clove into the loose soil I pat it down and when all are planted I cover the bed with about a foot of loose hay or straw. This will keep the garlic warm longer in the fall, allowing it to establish a good root system before the ground freezes.
Next spring the shoots will push right through the hay, but most weeds will not. If we have a warm fall, you might even see green shoots pushing through the hay now. Don’t worry. That won’t be a problem, come spring.
There are two kinds of garlic; hard-neck and soft-neck. Here in New England we do best growing hard-neck garlic. It has a stiff stem in the middle of each head where the scape grew last summer, while soft neck garlic does not.
Just as there are sweet onions and pungent onions that make you cry when you chop them, not all garlic tastes the same. If you are ordering garlic from a seed company, read the descriptions carefully. Be sure you are ordering hard-neck garlic. They should tell you about the flavor of each, and I recommend getting three different kinds for your first trial. Since seed garlic is relatively expensive, you will want to save some garlic each year for planting the next year.
If you use a lot of garlic in your recipes, pay attention to how many cloves are in each head. It is less work to peel one big clove than three small ones. I grow mainly large heads, and I often have to cut one clove into two or three pieces to fit it into my garlic press. The product description should tell you not only the size of the bulb but also the number of cloves per head.
You can store garlic best in a cool, dry place. Ideally 50 degrees with moderate humidity. You can freeze it in a zipper bag or jar for a year or more. Don’t store garlic at room temperature in oil, as it can produce deadly botulism.
Garlic plants are handsome, especially in July, when they send up tall flower scapes that twist and turn in great shapes. Think creatively and you can find a space to plant some. I often cut the scapes and use them in flower arrangements, and they are also good sliced and sautéed in a stir-fry.
In a recent article about putting the garden to bed, I failed to mention that it is a good plan to leave some flowers standing. Why? Because some beneficial insects lay eggs in or on the stalks to overwinter. Birds will also eat the seeds of things like black-eyed susans and coneflowers. So you have an excuse now not to clean up the gardens completely. You can finish in the spring.

A garlic bed ready for planting. Photo by Henry Homeyer.