A Primer for Planting Bulbs

Guidelines for purchasing and planting bulbs, as well as how to incorporate them in your garden design.

  • Topic: Bulbs
  • Author: Cindy Bellinger and Mary Ann Walz
  • Keywords: bulbs, fall, planting, Bulbs
  • Date: September 2003

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The poet and novelist May Sarton, who also published some wonderful heartfelt journals, loved gardening. She called it a grand passion.” Particularly fond of bulbs, she would end her workdays in the garden fussing over her lilies and daffodils. What she liked most about planting bulbs, though, was the atmosphere involved.

“At the moment of planting a bulb, all is hope, no dismay,” she wrote in “Plant Dreaming Deep,” a memoir about buying a house in rural New Hampshire. She often wrote about getting down on her hands and knees, sticking her hands in the earth and having the afternoons fly.

Planting bulbs is indeed a most pleasant pastime. If you’re interested in fall blooming bulbs, you need to plant them now. Spring flowering bulbs need to be planted in the fall after the first hard frost but before the ground gets too cold. In Santa Fe this is usually in October. Crocus, daffodil, hyacinth, tulip and other spring blooming bulbs are only available in the fall.

What’s made digging in bulbs nearly a must in gardens these days is many bulbs are xeric. They can tolerate long stretches of limited rainfall with some supplemental watering in the winter and then again in the spring.

Following are some guidelines:

Purchasing Bulbs

  • Anything in the box that looks like sawdust, a substance often found on tulips and is caused by an insect, is a warning. This indicates a poor quality bulb.
  • Bulbs should be firm. If soft, they will rot in the ground.
  • Choose bulbs with little new growth. Bulbs should produce roots in the fall; stem growth should take place in the spring.

When to Plant

  • Try getting bulbs in by the end of October. This allows them to get their roots settled in before winter.

How to Plant

  • Follow the directions on the packets when you buy the bulbs to plant at the correct depth. However, a good rule of thumb is to plant about three times deeper than the widest part of the bulb.
  • Dig a hole, either with a trowel or with a bulb planter. The dibble planting tool works especially well for planting many small bulbs. Add a handful of organic fertilizer such as Yum um Mix® to each hole.
  • Place the bulb roots down in the hole and cover with soil. lightly water and water occasionally during winter months if there is no snow.

Designing with Bulbs

For a range of continued bloom throughout the spring, keep in mind the bloom time—early, middle or late spring. Of course zones and other factors such as microclimates help determine when bulbs will loom.

Early bloomers

  • Crocus
  • Galanthus elwesii (Snow Drop)
  • Tulipa batalinii (Bright Gem)
  • Muscari, more commonly known as Grape Hyacinth
  • Tulipa pulchella (Persian Pearl)
  • Daffodils

Mid-spring bloomers

  • Daffodils, regular and miniature

Late spring bloomers

  • Daffodils
  • Wildflower Daffodils
  • Iris

Summer bloomers

  • Hemerocallis hyperion (Hyperion Daylily)
  • Allium sphaerocephalon (Drumstick Onion)

It’s often best to use enough of a single color and variety to make a definite impact because one bulb won’t give a very strong presence on its own. Bulbs usually look best placed in clumps of 5 to 7 of a single variety. Or drifts (groups) of closely planted bulbs in a perennial border create a blooming carpet while the perennials are just starting their foliage. By the time the bulbs have stopped blooming, the perennials will be tall enough to hide the dying foliage of the bulbs.

May Sarton once wrote: “There is surely something hauntingly symbolic about burying a living thing toward a sure resurrection, at a moment in the season when everything else is dying or on the way out.”

And it’s just that way with bulbs. Already in October we can envision masses of tulips and daffodils. It’s always something to look forward to.