2022 Gardening Diaries - 03-05. Planting new plant bulbs - Bindu Vinod
18 to 20 April 2022
I continued with hedge trimming on the 16th of April as I had missed out on a couple of shrubs last week. On the 17th, I continued with weed removal from my other garden beds. Since we covered both these in the last week, I thought I could skip through and go to the fifth day of my gardening journey.
Buying seeds, or seedlings is one of my favorite things to do at this time of year. This year I found an interesting item at Costco. It is called the Butterfly Garden, and it has 60 plants inside.
There were so many other options as well, but I decided to buy this one because all the three types of plants inside the bag are perennials, that is, they come back every year.
Another thing I consider while buying seeds or plants is the zone hardiness of the plants. Weather varies across different places. So, based on location, you need to know your hardiness zone and select plants that are suitable for that place. I use a website named planthardiness for that purpose.
And coming back to my butterfly garden, I preferred them because the pictures show beautiful flowers and foliage. So basically, this big bag has three Shaker’s Prayer Iris, 50 Blazing star and 7 Alcazar bulbs.
Today I planted 8 blazing star bulbs, all the 3 Shaker’s Iris roots, and all the 7 Alcazar bulbs.
Planting them in a pot is not a big deal because I have a lot of small pots and also potting soil handy. The problem is with pampering these babies and growing them properly before transplanting them to the actual ground. The weather is still cold outside. So, as you can see, I have left them inside my home for now.
Usually, before transplanting plants from inside or planting new plants outside, we need to check if the last frost of the season has passed. I generally use this website called Almanac for checking the frost dates. For our place, the last frost is around the first week of May. So, I will keep these babies inside for at least 3 more weeks and then plant them in the garden.
So again, fingers crossed. Let us all hope that these babies survive and blossom into beautiful plants. I have a few tomato and pepper seeds. Let’s work on them tomorrow. So, see you tomorrow then. Bye, bye!