Flower Gardens...A Peaceful Retreat

A beautiful garden will bring peace and tranquility to your surroundings. A successful garden can be a work in progress.

Gardens deserve abundance. Fill your garden with all your favorites. Successful flower gardens take work and planning, returning abundant rewards.

Mulch Your Spring Bulbs In The Fall For A Beautiful Spring Display

Flower bulbs need a good, long, winters sleep. If bulbs wake up before the proper time, they won’t bloom well at all.

When you have a mild winter, the soil remains too warm, and the bulbs come out too soon They start to grow, and once the tips are above the soil line, they will freeze if the temperatures dip back down below freezing. And that’s usually what happens. After the bulbs have emerged, and you have a freeze they usually wont bloom at all, but if they do bloom they tend to be pretty pathetic.

Another reason this can happen is if the bulbs were not planted deep enough. Even if you initially planted the bulbs deep enough, as the soil freezes and thaws, the bulbs will work their way back up in the ground.

One way to keep your flower bulbs from emerging to early, and also protect them from freezing, is to mulch the bed. In the fall apply a 3-4” layer of well composted mulch. This layer of mulch will maintain a higher moisture content in the soil, which is good, as long as the soil isn’t too soggy.

A 3-4” layer of mulch will also act as an insulator. It keeps the soil from freezing for a while, which is good because you don’t want the bulbs freezing and thawing. Then when the temperatures drop below freezing and stay there for a while, the soil will still freeze. Then the mulch will work in reverse and helps the soil from thawing out too early. Keeping bulbs frozen is actually good because they remain dormant for a longer period of time.

Hopefully after all this by the time they do emerge from the ground the danger of a hard freeze is past and they will not be damaged. If you have succeeded in keeping them from freezing, they will flower beautifully.

You can also plant annual flowers in the same beds with your spring bulbs. After the danger of frost is over and it’s time to plant the annuals, the top of the bulbs have died back and will need to be removed. The mulch that you added in the fall will also help nourish the annual flowers, as well as improve the soil permanently.