Henry Homeyer: It’s time to plant — yes, really!

By Henry Homeyer
©2024 Telegraph Publishing LLC

For some of us, planting time is long past. But not for me. I am always busy in the fall, planting everything I can. It is almost time to plant garlic, which is my easiest crop of all. And I’ll soon be planting spring bulbs, both in the ground and in pots for forcing.

Now is the time to purchase bulbs and seed garlic if you don’t have any garlic of your own to plant.

Garlic is by far my least labor-intensive vegetable crop. I start by weeding out one of my wide, mounded beds and loosening the soil well. I use my CobraHead Weeder to loosen the soil and to make shallow furrows 8 to 12 inches apart. I sprinkle some granular organic fertilizer in the furrow, and run my hand tool through the soil again to work in the fertilizer.

Each garlic bulb has 4 to 8 cloves, which need to be separated for planting.  Plant them 3- to 4-inches apart and about 3-inches deep. Cover and press down the soil over them, watering if the soil is dry. Lastly, mulch with a thick layer of straw or mulch hay. I use 8 to 12 inches of loose straw which gets packed down to 4 inches by the winter snows. Garlic will grow up through the mulch, but most weeds will not.

To learn more about garlic, you might want to read “The Garlic Companion: Recipes, Crafts, Preservation Techniques and Simple Ways to Grow Your Own” by Kristin Graves. (Storey Publishing, 2024). A nice book, it taught me few things and has recipes I will try. Kristin is a Canadian farmer who grows 75,000 bulbs of garlic each year, so she knows her stuff!

I also plant a lot of spring-blooming bulb flowers in pots for early blossoms indoors and as gifts to friends.  I mix used planting mix from summer pots with good compost and plant daffodils and tulips in planters and my window box. You can pack the bulbs close together in pots – and they need only a couple of inches of soil mix above and below them. Store them in a cool, dark place – 35 to 50 degrees is best. But even a cold garage will work if they can establish roots early and then snooze a little if the soil freezes.

Daffodils take about 12 weeks of dormancy before they should be brought into the warmth of the house, but tulips do better with 16 weeks. Little things like crocus can be forced in 8 to 10 weeks. Be sure to label them with the date planted and variety. Water lightly once a month. My favorites are Tête-à-Tête daffodils – small early daffodils in bright yellow. I pack 4 bulbs into a 4-inch pot and share them in February and March when friends need a pick-me-up.

This is also the time to plant bulbs outdoors for spring. Most bulbs like a sunny location with well-drained soil, but you can also plant bulbs under deciduous trees if they get enough sun filtered through them, or before they leaf out. If you have a site with good sun but moist soil, there a few bulbs that will work. “Thalia” is a white blossomed, late-blooming daffodil that does well even in fairly wet soil.

Camassia is a bulb plant that prefers damp soil. It produces blue to purple flowers on tall stems – up to 3 feet tall with hundreds of small blossoms. A good sandy loam is best, but it will do fine in any sunny soil that stays moist during the bloom season. It is not of interest to deer, and will keep coming back for years if happy where you plant it.

Tulips, on the other hand are delicious to deer as flowers, and to rodents as bulbs. During World War II some Dutch bulb growers avoided starvation by eating their tulip bulbs, though I have never been that hungry! To foil the deer I plant 100 tulips in my vegetable garden most years and surround and cover the bed with chicken wire. I grow them as annuals, pulling the bulbs after they bloom.

Planting 100 bulbs of the same kind means they all bloom at about the same time. So I cut them and put flowers in quart jars and deliver to friends, neighbors, the elderly and the infirm. It is so much fun to do so! Try it.

Over the years I have planted hundreds, nay, thousands of daffodil bulbs. Most survive and thrive – nothing eats them. I have a patch of daffies from bulbs I dug up at my boyhood home in the early 1970s – some 50 years ago. To keep them producing well it’s good to top-dress the soil with ‘”bulb booster” or a good slow-release organic fertilizer — either now, or in the spring.

To plant 25 daffodils I dig a hole about 6 inches deep, a couple of feet long and about 18-inches across. I loosen up the soil in the bottom with my CobraHead Weeder. I sprinkle a cup or so of organic fertilizer in the bottom, and work it in, working in a bucket of compost, too. Then I plant the bulbs, pointy end up. The directions may tell you to plant daffodils 6-inches apart, but I tend to plant them 3- or 4-inches apart and they do fine. I press them down into the loose soil.

Lastly, I refill the hole. If the soil is full of rocks, I remove them. If it is sandy or full of clay, I mix the soil I use to refill the hole with a 50-50 mix of good compost and soil.

So take a sunny afternoon and go plant bulbs – either outdoors, or in pots for forcing. It’ll be something to look forward to all winter.

Henry is writing just one article per month. You can reach him at henry.homeyer@comcast.net or by commenting below.