My First Bulbs - Success!

by Jenny
(Atlanta, Georgia, USA)

I love gardening, but I hadn't ever tried growing bulbs before. Daffodils and tulips look great and grow well here. I really love irises as well. A previous owner of my house had planted a few tulips and one of them keeps coming up every year.

saw a big package of assorted summer-flowering bulbs at the local home improvement chain, so I thought, "Why not?". They were much smaller and cleaner to bring home than transplants, which is handy if you do your shopping by bicycle like I do. Planting the bulbs turned out to be a lot easier than I thought too. The holes I had to dig were much smaller than I had imagined. They didn't need watering to get established like transplants do.

I have soaker hoses on a timer which keep my garden at a proper moisture. I sprinkled a little bit of bulb fertilizer in to help them grow. When they started to sprout they were much stronger than seeds since they had already stored energy from a previous year's growth. It was really fun to see what each sprout grew into as I had planted an assortment and didn't remember exactly what went where.

Almost every bulb grew and produced beautiful flowers. I had iris, ranunculus, and whole bunch of other types which I don't remember the names of. They mixed in nicely with the dianthus, coneflowers, and hydrangea I already had growing in the border If you haven't tried bulbs before... why not?! They're so easy and give beautiful results. I look forward to mine repeating the same show next year.

Flower Bulbs on eBay