Why am I inside?

It was 70 degrees and sunny today, the first week of November, in Chicago. And I spent it inside.
Yesterday I got a ride in the country, and today I had to pay for it with a day in front of the computer. I have more than 500 bulbs to plant, but tomorrow I'm going to a business meeting in a hotel conference center. The only gardening I've done this week is watering the houseplants. How did it all go so wrong?

Just not ready to plant bulbs

Once again, I was out in the garden today and couldn't bring myself to plant any bulbs. I have them -- have a list of them (more than 600) by species, cultivar and bloom time -- have a plan in writing for where each blessed one is to go in the garden -- all in writing. Have every bulb-planting tool known to man, of which all I ever use are a trowel and a shovel. But I just couldn't do it.

It didn't feel like time yet. The air was not crisp and bracing. Most of the leaves haven't begun to turn, apart from the stray 'Autumn Blaze' maple or gingko here and there. Despite day after day of drizzly rain and night after night deep into the 40s, there are brave little pink flower buds on the pot of impatiens on the patio table. The coleus has shriveled up and died, but the elephant ears, the geraniums on the stoop and many of the other annuals I've been waiting for frost to kill are hanging tough. The turtlehead and toad lilies are still blooming their hearts out, along with the goldenrod, Russian sage and lobelia out back in the sun. In my beds, everything gets packed tightly, and I cannot bring myself to cut down and clear away blooming perennials to make room to dig holes for bulbs.

I needed something to do to keep me out in the sun and fresh air today, so I got out the pole pruner and whacked back as much suckering growth as I could reach from the gnarly old mulberry over the patio and and the weedy Norway maple that keeps trying to make my part-shade bed into full shade. There was not a sign of leaf color on any of the branches that I brought tumbling down.

To plant bulbs, I need some physical cues, the way a poinsettia responds to day length and a crocus sprout responds to soil temperature. I need a frost to kill the impatiens and make them yucky melted green stems instead of brave little flower buds. I need colorful leaves cascading from the maples and the hackberry and the elms and the oak. I need to need to do some raking before I can tuck scilla bulbs into the lawn. I need a chill in the air that requires a turtleneck and a layer or two. I need to be able to ruthlessly yank out annuals that have died and hack away perennials that have gone dormant. It helps if there's a whiff of smoke in the air late in the afternoon from the neighbors' first wood fire.

I was pruning in a T-shirt this afternoon. T-shirt weather is not bulb-planting weather. It just won't do.

Now, I realize I am taking a risk. Warm as it may be (some days), the later it gets in October, the greater the risk of a sudden Arctic cold front that freezes the soil and leaves me with a lot of bulbs on my hands. Like that year (was it last year? the year before last?) when we got nearly a foot of snow the first week in December and me with hardly a bulb planted. I seized on one of those January warm spells (Chicago weather is nothing if not various) to scrape away mulch and shove bulbs into the chilly muck. A few of them bloomed.

Even if we don't get slammed, unless I get the bulbs in the ground soon they won't have many weeks to work on their root systems before the ground freezes up sometime during Advent. Every day they are out of the ground they risk drying out or getting moldy. And if I don't get them planted at all, they won't get the 14 weeks of winter chill they need to know to bloom next spring.

But I feel like I am caught in a gardener purgatory. All of the summer tasks are finished; all of the preparation-for-fall tasks are finished. I'm ready. I want it to be time for fall tasks -- collecting and shredding leaves and stashing them away, tucking up the dormant elephant ear tubers, planting the Narcissus 'Bridal Crown' and 'Tete a Tete' and 'Mount Hood' and the Allium ostrowskianum and Chionodoxa and the 'Elegant Lady' lily-flowered tulips. Can't I have a freeze please?


Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe .

All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.

Rain at last

We've finally had rain -- and the right kind: long, slow and soaking. I counted less than an inch in my yard, but that's an inch more than we've gotten in the last month or so. I take full credit: I finally broke down and set up a sprinkler on the lawn yesterday, first time I had watered the lawn all season. So of course it rained. You're very welcome.

I don't think anything, even the grass, has really suffered much from a few rainless weeks. We had so much rain earlier in the summer that there was a deep reservoir of water in the soil. I just succumbed to a primitive, atavistic urge to water the lawn. I feel like an ex-smoker who's backslid. But hey, the president is having trouble quitting too.

Here's hoping that there is plenty of good rain the next couple of weeks, and then a couple of nice dry weeks in early October so I can plant the couple of hundred bulbs I have already accumulated. I have planted bulbs in the rain; I have planted bulbs through melting snow in a warm spell in January. But that is not my choice of bulb-planting conditions. Dry and sunny, between 50 and 55, with migrating geese honking overhead, please.

Plants do need watering in the fall. A lot of people sort of give it up on it as the season dwindles and the plants lose their blooms and leaves. But even though the top growth has died back the roots are still growing. Evergreens resist winter kill much better if they have lots of water stored in their needles and root systems. Any tree or shrub planted in the last two years, and any perennial planted this year, needs diligent watering going into its first winter, because it probably hasn't had time to grow a big enough system of feeder roots to glean enough water from rainfall.

Bulbs need watering too. They go into the ground dormant, but then they need to immediately start growing roots, I was recently told by Scott Kunst, who owns Old House Gardens in Ann Arbor, which sells heirloom bulbs. They need those roots to store enough water to get going in spring. And if they don't get water in fall they can't grow the roots. So it's important to plant bulbs in well-drained soil, but it's also important to water when you plant them and keep watering regularly until the ground freezes.


Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe .

All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.

Teachers: Think about bulbs

Many teachers like the idea of making gardens part of their teaching. Gardens have a lot to teach -- about plants, about soil, about science and math, about patience, about responsibility, about food. And many teachers, when they think garden, think vegetables. They want to use a school garden, like the White House vegetable garden, to teach about nutrition and the pleasures of wise eating. And they figure the appeal of growing something you can eat will keep kids interested.

But there are practical problems with this approach. One is that many teachers don't know much about gardening and don't know where to start. Vegetable gardening isn't rocket science, but there is a learning curve. And the easy vegetables that are best for beginners -- radishes, lettuce -- are not high on the average kid's list of favorite snacks.

Another big problem is that the normal Chicago-area school year doesn't fit well with the vegetable-growing season. Assume that you start vegetable seeds in the classroom in the winter to plant outdoors in the spring. Seed-starting is magical for kids -- watching a little bitty brown nubbin turn into a little green sprout on the windowsill (especially if you do the seed-starting in transparent plastic containers so they can watch the roots grow).

But when it's planting-out time in Chicago in the middle of May, the school year is almost over. The kids will never see a crop. The vegetables will likely die over the summer with no one to water and weed.

And the few vegetable species that you can plant outdoors earlier in spring so kids have a chance to eat what they grow are . . . well, lettuce and radishes. And spinach. Yum.

To ease these difficulties, I have two suggestions:

1. Ask for help. The University of Illinois Extension educators and Master Gardeners volunteers help a lot of school gardens get started (find your local office here). They can help you figure out what it's practical to try. The National Gardening Association has a fine web site on the topic, kidsgardening.com. And out of Lake County, Anne Nagro runs GardenABCs.com, a forum about learning gardens for parents, teachers and volunteers.

The Chicago Botanic Garden has curriculum help, training courses for teachers and an online School Garden Wizard to help with the planning. The extension also has a site on planning a school garden.

2. Try bulbs. The kids can't eat them, but they can certainly plant them. They're easy, they're pretty and they coincide perfectly with the school year: You plant them in October and they bloom, depending on species, from March through May.

You don't need a lot of space or even a plot of ground; with the OK of the principal and the janitor, bulbs might be tucked into the existing school landscape. Or perhaps (with permission) into a nearby park.

Imagine a cluster of crocuses planted right by the school door, poking their tender shoots up even while there's still snow on the ground. Imagine the kids watching and monitoring and measuring and anticipating until the flowers open their brave petals in March. Couldn't you teach to that?

Check out the Bulb Project. It's a web site on planting bulbs with school children, sponsored by the U.S. Netherlands Flower Bulb Information Center, the press information office of the Dutch flower bulb industry. There are suggested projects and plenty of information about bulbs to get you started.

Another component of the project is asking garden retailers to sponsor bulb-planting projects at schools. There's one funding source to consider. It doesn't have to be an expensive project, if you can borrow some digging tools, can get some compost donated and have a hose available. $200 or $300 would buy quite a few bulk tulip and daffodil bulbs.

Bulbs have an interesting biology, which can certainly provide plenty of science lessons. You could dissect a bulb and see the layers, like an onion's, and figure out what they are for. You could force some bulbs, such as paperwhite narcissus, crocus, early daffodils or hyacinths, into bloom on the classroom windowsill in winter or early spring.

You could discover how bulb-forming plants reproduce (hint: there's more than one way). You could discuss why the pointy end (ideally) goes upward in the hole (and why it's not actually essential). You could talk about why the bulbs don't bloom in winter and how they know when it's time to start growing. You could chart the expected bloom times, collect data on when the plants actually sprout and flower and monitor the weather to search for explanations.

And it's not just biology. Kids could study up on the Netherlands, where most of the bulbs sold in the U.S. today are grown, and then on the countries where the bulbs actually evolved -- Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan. Show them the stylized tulips in the design of a Persian rug and have them design their own rugs. Learn about the how bulbs were imported to Europe and how the Dutch grow them today. Teach about the wild tulip market bubble of the 1600s and compare it to other bubbles -- real estate? stock market, anyone?

But the best lesson from bulbs is the sheer wonder that a dry, brown, often shriveled and ugly thing can go in the ground in fall, when leaves are dropping and the world is turning gray, seemingly dead or at least in a coma, and, when it's ready, become something wonderful. Like a child.

Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe .

All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.