May Week 3

Organic Gardening Calendar
23 Weeks to frost free date in zone 6

By: Kathi
Every year about this time I get lots of questions from friends asking if it is OK to transplant or dig up something.

Things you will need:
Bulb clumps you want to thin
Shovel
Bone Meal
Bulb fertilizer
Compost
Flour

Just yesterday a friend was telling me about her flower bed she is refurbishing. In the process of digging it up (something I try to avoid) she found that her tulip bulbs had reproduced and she now had hundreds of them, but did not know how to store them until planting time in the fall.

Tulips, buttercups, Lycoris, Iris, every bulb or tuber I can think of prefers to be in the dirt. When you dig up that clump of buttercups that are no longer blooming because they are so crowded, you replant them immediately. It is the same with all bulbs. Select their new home and move them. Certainly professional growers have specialized refrigerated storage for their bulbs, but I don’t have that sort of equipment. We all very often think that if it comers from the grower this way, that is the proper way to treat a plant at home. Not so much.

When you dig up your bulbs the first critical calculation you must make is depth of bulb and angle of your shovel. Many a bulb have been sliced in two by not anticipating how deep the bulbs are. Here I must say, however, if you slice open a bulb like a buttercup or Lycoris, if there is a root section and the growing tip is still there-if you cut off the side of the bulb…go ahead and plant the bulb. It will grow. Throw away any parts that do not have a tip and at least a bit of root area. They won’t grow.

Bulb planting is one of those things that should not be done lazily. After all my advocating for lazy gardening, here I’m telling you, the more effort you put into replanting the bulbs, the better off you will be bloom wise and in the long run effort wise.

Take the clump of bulbs and separate them. If I get a particularly nice “mother bulb” and fully grown new bulb that are still attached to each other, I will keep those together. These large bulbs will give some fullness to the blooming pattern for the first year or two until the replanted bulbs begin to look full again.

Don’t make the mistake I’ve made of digging a trench, however wide and planting the bulbs in an organized pattern. Invariably the bulbs get planted too close together, so you are re-digging in just a few years, and besides they look dumb planted that way.

For each bulb dig a hole that is 4-5 times the width of the bulb and 4-5 times the height of the bulb. Take out the soil and mix it with bone meal, some compost, sand if you have heavy clay soil, and a good organic bulb fertilizer. Also include a dose of mole med if you have moles and voles eating your bulbs. Use your shovel to chop these ingredients together to get a nice uniform mix, and get rid of clumps of dirt. You want the dirt going in over the bulb to fill in around the bulb completely and not leave air pockets.

Then remember your spacing. With bulbs, spaced randomly is what I prefer, but if you are going for a formal look, still separate those bulbs at a minimum 15 times their width. This gives them room to grow and reproduce. Once the bulb(s) are covered, I top off each hole with flour. Flour??? Yep. That way I can see where they are, most critters don’t care for bleached white flour and it is pretty cheap. Then I water them thoroughly but very slowly. A fine mist or a soaker hose is the next best thing to rain. If done slowly enough, the residue of the flour remains so you can see where not to dig when you go to set out the annuals you use to over plant your bulbs,