Anticipation

A warm day let me get out into the garden and discover exciting little bumps of green everywhere!

If the weather cooperates, these will be exploding into purple and yellow and happiness everywhere! 

Can't wait.

Friday Cartoon: All I want for Christmas

Friday Garden Cartoon: Plant those bulbs!

It is that time of year again. Get out there and start planting!

See all my garden cartoons here

It worked! Effortless bulb forcing!

A little over a year ago, I read that Iris reticulata doesn't require a cold period to flower. I got all excited, and planned to try growing them indoors for effortless winter color, but it was too late and I couldn't find them for sale anywhere.
So this fall, I bought a couple bags. I kept forgetting to pot them up, but in early January I stuck them in a pot, and put them in a sunny windowsill.

This afternoon, I came home and saw a few bits of purple blue:

I instantly ran in closer to soak up the pure joy...

And then started trying to take artsy backlit pictures

In short: It works! I have glorious fragrant irises blooming while there is a good six inches of snow outside, and they were no work whatsoever. As easy as paper whites or amaryllis, but without the need to stake or douse with alcohol to keep them from falling over. I think these are my new favorite bulb for winter flowers! Next year I'm going to buy oodles of them and start planting them up earlier so I can have them all winter.

Friday Cartoon: Indian Summer

We've had a perfectly glorious week here in Michigan -- 60s and sunny. This is what I WANTED to do...

Why have I lived so long without fall crocuses?

After years of looking at the fall blooming crocus options in bulb catalogs, this year I finally bought a few.

Oh. My. God.

I am in love. Why on earth have I lived so long without these marvelous things? This is Crocus speciosus, and as you can see, if is insanely beautiful. Elegant. Graceful. Intricate. I think it may be even better than the spring flowering species I have been nuts about forever. Why did I buy so FEW? Next year they're going in by the hundred.

The proper way to buy and plant bulbs

 I shouldn't really say the "proper" way, as there really isn't a proper way to do anything in the garden. But, after a decade of experimentation, it is by far the best method I have found for dealing with the bewitching little things. You may have other methods, but I doubt any will be quite as effective as this one.

The first critical thing is to order them from catalogs. There are practical reasons for this (price, selection, quality) but the real, essential, reason is that you can do it curled up comfortably on your couch with a hot cup of tea, gleefully circling things -- SO much more pleasant than standing in a garden center looking at bins of bulbs. It is also critically important to order your bulbs are early in the year as possible, for a reason I will explain in a moment, and this can't be done at the garden center. So order from catalogs.

To order successfully, you need to do two things: Order a lot (roughly twice as much as any reasonable person would) and order from a really great catalog.
Choosing a great catalog is a matter of taste. There are many companies with excellent selections and prices, but when curled up on the couch circling things, what really matters most is how well they are written. Every year I also get catalogs from companies whose names I can't remember with extremely low prices and garish, horrible photographs that describe each and every variety as "Amazing!" These catalogs go straight into the trash. White Flower Farm is lovely, but over-priced and feels a bit snobbish without an extensive selection to back it up. Like a restaurant where you can't wear jeans, but the food isn't any better than the local diner. I always start to look through Brent and Becky's Bulbs, because they have a great selection, but the prose and photography are both so poor it kills the mood, leaving me to indulge in my long-time favorite, McClure and Zimmerman. No photos, which allows for more fun imagining things, and clear, simply worded descriptions. I read it over and over, making list after list of things I simply must have.

Once you have spent a few gleeful weeks looking over and re-looking over your order, circling this and that, imagining them all in the garden or in a vase, you finally place your order, and move on to the next critical step, which is:

Forget everything you ordered.

This is very hard to do, but very important. The first few years I gardened, I couldn't pull it off, but I've gradually become quite talented at it (I'm told it will only get easier as one gets older). I order as soon as possible and as much as possible, and once I'm done I throw myself into other gardening tasks and never, never, never look back at any bulb catalogs. As fall comes along, and you start seeing bulbs for sale at the grocery store, it is tempting to try and remember what you ordered, but resist!  Keep thinking about asters and mums or your fall crop of lettuce and put bulbs out of your mind.

If you succeed, one day, you will find a big, surprisingly heavy box has arrived. You know it is full of bulbs but you don't know what bulbs they are. It is like Christmas, only better, because you needn't worry that you won't like it. You spent weeks picking them out, they are sure to be perfect, but what, oh what could they be?

My Big Box of Bulbs arrived last week and OH! It was exciting. I opened it carefully, then spent the next 10 minutes pulling out package after packaging and going "Princess Irene! OH! MORE Princess Irene! I LOVE her!" and "I can't believe I got SO MANY dwarf irises! I'm going to force a bunch of them. Oh my god! I got ANOTHER dozen of 'Harmony!'" and doing little happy dances all over the place. I didn't go quite so far as to kiss any of them, but I certainly thought about it. By the way, it is best, if possible, to do this alone. Non-gardening friends and relations who don't know that 'Princess Irene' is the most gorgeous tulip in the history of the world, a decidant orange shot with purple, won't understand the happy dances and tend to make unfortunant comments like, "How much did you SPEND on all of this?" and "Where are you going to plant them?" So, if at all possible, be alone. If not, simply ignore these comments. They are perfectly reasonable, and reasonable is the exact opposite of what you should be when dealing with bulbs.

Next, you plant them. All over the place. There is lots of good advice on planting bulbs, but it always leaves out the critical step necessary for a really successful bulb planting: Don't label them. If you MUST be organized (though I don't really advise it) you can write down what you planted where, but as soon as you do so be very sure to loose that piece of paper. Because, again, you now need to try very hard to forget everything you can. Spend the winter with seed catalogs and gardening books, thinking about tomato varieties and petunias. When spring finally arrives, you'll know there are great masses of crocuses and snowdrops and such around somewhere... but where exactly? Each warm day you can go out, carefully poking about here and there, giggling gleefully each time you find a little mass of green spikes showing through the soil. As the days warm, you'll constantly be surprised by little drifts of crocuses in full bloom. Daffodils will greet you in a corner you swear you never thought of. A thicket of tulips will errupt by the front stairs and one day reveal themselves to be 'Ballerina', the most lovely of the surpasingly elegant lily-flowered tulips, and you can sit down in delight staring at their slim, curved petals. As you are looking at them, the postman (or postwoman, as the case may be) will come by, holding a thick stack of catalogs and you can sit on the steps in the warm spring sun, and start dreaming of next year...

That is how your order bulbs. Or how you do it if you are not at all sensible. Sensible people, no doubt, do it very differently but I personally wouldn't be sensible about bulbs for anything.

Friday cartoon: planting bulbs

This weeks cartoon is a little different. More serious than silly. But I read something this week, and can't get it out of my mind... This says something about the real reason I garden. If you don't get it, don't worry -- Friday silliness will return next week.

Sciency Answers: What do bulbs know, and how do they know it?

I got another great question from Annie of Annie's Annuals:

 Hi Joseph !
  I hope you don't mind 2 questions in one month !
So I'm looking at all my demo beds today, September 30th, and i'm noticing all the Spring blooming bulbs have awoken and are actively growing . Now how do they know to do this ? How do they know that its almost Fall?  They are buried and can't "see" the day length, Its not a temperature drop signaling Fall (in fact it went to 100F here this week ) and they get watered every day, so its not a Fall rains-after-a-dry-Summer-thing. i am in wonder of it all ! Can you explain this mysterious bulb-psychic behavior ?

your faithful reader , Annie


I love this question!
Let's start this answer by remembering the last time you got on a plane and flew across a few time zones. The first few days after you arrive, you get to experience the joys of jet lag, walking around with your body saying "It is night time! Time to go to sleep!" while the bright sun in the sky is clearly saying "It is day time! Time to be up and about!" After a few days you adjust to the local time and everything is fine. Until, of course, you head back home and get to go through it all again.
Jet lag demonstrates how we humans tell what time it is: We use a combination of external signals (is it light, or dark?) and an internal clock, our circadian cycle.  We get jet lagged when the two ways of telling time don't line up. In response to the confusion, our internal clock gradually adjust until the two are in sync again.
Plants are just the same -- they use external signals, the sun, and an internal clock, circadian rhythms, to tell when time it is. Take the signals from the sun away by putting them in a box, and they'll keep up their daily cycle for a while: Daylilies will still last a day, morning glories still open in the morning, and four-o'clocks will still bloom around 4 pm. Plant's internal clock is very well established scientifically, and researchers have even started figuring out how exactly that clock works at the level of genes and proteins (which is cool, but also gets incredibly confusing pretty quickly... at least to me). But Annie's question relates to something else: Do plants have an internal calendar as well as a clock?
This is a really interesting question. Sadly, science doesn't have a very good answer for it, meaning that from here on out this is going to be more of an "educated guess answer" than a "sciency answer"  because I haven't been able to find any good research on the subject. The lack of research is probably due to the fact you would have to be working on the scale of years not days and it is hard to convince people to spend years on something that might not even work. Even so, I think the evidence is very strong that at least some plants have some kind of internal calendar to go along with their circadian clock.

Colchicum flowering on a windowsill (photo credit)

After all, as Annie says in her question, bulbs sprout without any external environmental signals. Colchicum for example, flower in the fall, and they will do so even if you forget to plant them and leave them in your (climate controlled, artificially lit) house on a table. The horticulture industry even uses the effect, importing jet lagged amaryllis (hippeastrum spp.) bulbs grown in South Africa (link) to get bulbs that will flower in time for Christmas here in the Northern hemisphere. In his book, Cape Bulbs, Richard L. Doutt, advises collectors of South African bulbs in the Northern hemisphere to import seeds rather than plants, because the jet lagged plants have trouble adapting to our inverted seasons. Gardeners know and deal with bulbs that know what time of year it is, even if science hasn't looked into the matter yet.
In my personal experience, the effect isn't just limited to bulbs. Last year, I got some (normally) autumn flowering sedum ('Matrona', I think) from a friend. She was doing research on their flowering, and tricked them (with artifical lighting) to bloom in the spring. Once they flowered, she didn't need the plants anymore, so I took some home and planted them, in full flower, in the spring. All that summer they never really grew, just limping along fitfully. I think they were jet lagged, expecting winter to come after they finished flowering and instead getting a big dose of summer. Eventually, of course, winter did arrive, which apparently reset their internal calendar, allowing them to grow and flower normally this year. An internal calendar isn't the only possible explanation -- maybe they just had an extreme case of transplant shock -- but I think it is likely.
Putting all this together, I think it is clear that many bulbs, and perhaps other plants, have some kind of internal calendar keeping track of what time of year it is. But given the lack of research on the subject, I can't say much authoritative or "sciency" on the subject... Any plant physiologists out there looking for a PhD project? This would be an awesome one! It will probably take you a decade to get useful data, but think how cool it will be when you finished!

Have a question? Send me an e-mail (engeizuki at gmail dot com) and I'll provide a sciency answer!

Another reason to mail order your bulbs?

I got a flower bulb catalog the other day from Colorblends. It was a bit late for me as I always put in my bulb orders back in June to take advantage of early-bird sales from my prefered source, McClure and Zimmerman, but I never turn down a chance to browse a catalog. One thing caught my eye: They had a little essay explaining that most daffodils sold in stores in the US are harvest and shipped too early, before they've had a chance to mature and dry properly, because big box stores demand early shipment to get their displays up early, and most independant garden centers feel forced to follow suit in order to compete. They say this makes the bulbs significantly more succeptable to fungal damage in shipment.

I always mail order my bulbs anyway (aside from a few impulse purchases) for the better selection and better prices. Guess you can add "not harvested too early" to that list as well.

Friday Cartoon: The bulb cycle

Friday Cartoon: Buying Bulbs

I was at the grocery store, and they had a big display of bulbs for sale. I already put in a huge order for bulbs, but....