Spring Planting In The Fall
When autumn leaves are turning color and a chill is in the air, it's time to plan your spring garden - beginning with daffodils.
Garden designer P. Allen Smith shares his secrets on The Saturday Early Show for planting daffodil bulbs, ensuring a beautiful spring garden.
Smith says daffodils are the first bulbs to plant in the fall and one of the first flowers to bloom in the spring. Smith also explains that the flower may be the answer to your prayers if you have a deer or rodent problem because garden pests don't like the taste of daffodil bulbs.
Choose an area that you won't use during the rest of the year, for instance, along a picket fence. The bulbs naturalize in most U.S. gardens. Naturalizing bulbs are ones that feel so at home that they multiply naturally, on their own, increasing in numbers year after year. Daffodils will grow in average soil, as long as it is well drained.
For nourishment, Smith works plenty of compost and some bone meal (crushed animal bones) into the soil. Gardeners who have a problem with burrowing pests, like gophers and moles, should not use bone meal. Some gardeners even build little cages made of chicken wire, which they plant along with the bulbs to keep pests away. Daffodils prefer full sun, but most will tolerate half shade.
Another design tip is to be generous with bulbs, and plant in large patches of 10-15 bulbs of the same variety. When Smith plants his bulbs, the first thing he does is place them on the top soil three to four inches apart. Then he plants them about six inches deep - or three times as deep as the bulb is wide.
The best time to plant is when the ground temperature (at a depth of 6-8 inches) is at or below 60 degrees, usually around the date of the first frost or when trees begin to lose their leaves. To measure soil temperature, dig a hole eight inches deep in your garden area, insert a soil thermometer or a standard room thermometer upright in the earth, and wait five minutes. To get the best root growth, it's important that the soil temperature not be more than 60 degrees.
If it's February or March and you still haven't planted your bulbs, get them in the ground as soon as possible if the bulbs are still firm. Bulbs planted late will bloom later than normal and will have shorter stems, but the bulbs will catch up in a year or two. If you never get around to planting your bulbs, don't bother storing them for next year. Any bulb that is left out of the ground for more than a year will dry out or rot.
Once Smith has planted the bulbs, he likes to add companion plants, such as kale for the fall and pansies or violas for the spring. Gardeners in a mild climates can try pansies or violas in the fall, and they will likely bloom all winter long.
Smith thinks that pansies in dark blues make a striking contrast to the yellow daffodils. Violas are also a good choice because they don't require as much light as pansies do. Just plant the companion plant directly over the daffodils. This is called over-planting. When the bulbs emerge in the spring, they will grow through the pansies and violas.
When you go to the store or online to purchase your daffodils, keep in mind that bulbs come in different grades or sizes. The larger bulbs often have several "eyes" (sprouts on the bulb). The larger the bulb, the more eyes it has. Larger bulbs are great for formal displays or containers. But Smith suggests picking a bag of smaller, lesser grade daffodils if you're planning to have daffodils around in your garden.
While daffodils will grow throughout most of the country, some varieties perform better than others in any given area. With more than 13,000 daffodil hybrids available, gardeners should feel free to experiment and compare notes with other gardeners to find the bulbs that will perform best.
Though it varies by region, daffodil-growing season begins in March and ends in May. The blooms are likely to start appearing in April.