November « 2019 « The Yellow Farmhouse Garden

November 21, 2019

Save your gladiolus cormels to grow more flowers

Filed under: Flowers — Tags: bulbs, corms, dig bulbs, gladiolus, retro flowers, save bulbs, summer flowering bulbs — bob @ 12:49 pm

Gladiolus are one of the most popular flowers in the world.

Typically, glads are used to fill floral arrangements providing lots of color and their upright spikes add a vertical element.

Many gardeners from the baby boomer generation think of funerals whenever they see glads. That’s because the flowers were ubiquitous in funeral homes back when they were children. In addition to the general solemn atmosphere of a funeral, all of those huge funeral floral arrangements everywhere could make a lasting impression on a young child. So you can understand why gladiolus fell out of favor for awhile.

Nowadays the younger generations are embracing retro flowers of all kinds including glads for outdoor flower beds as well as cut flowers.

Glads are summer flowering bulbs, meaning they can’t stay in the ground all winter. They have to be dug up and stored over winter in an area protected from freezing temperatures.

Even though glads are called flowering bulbs the bulb is actually a “corm”, not a true bulb. The corm is what is dug up and stored for planting next spring.

Each year the gladiolus plant produces a new corm and discards the old one. In addition to a new corm, the plant produces a number of miniature corms called “cormels”.

Here are a few corms after drying and before cleaning. They were dug around the first of November. The dark-colored area is the old corm which, along with soil, will be removed and discarded before storage. The cormels are picked off and kept a paper bag until spring.

A new gladiolus plant can be grown from each cormel but it takes patience. The larger the cormel, the sooner the flowers.

The smallest cormels are about the size of a pea seed and may take three or even four years before full size flowers are produced. Larger cormels, about the diameter of a dime, will produce flowers in two to three years.

The small cormels can be planted in rows almost like seeds, about an inch or so deep. Then they are tended through the growing season much like any other garden plant and dug back up in the fall.

Three or four years may seem like a long time to wait for flowers but gardeners, as a general rule, are a patient bunch. It’s always a big kick to see flowers growing from those cormels you grew yourself. Plus you can increase your crop of flowers each year if you want.

On the other hand, if you are not patient enough to wait that long, you can always buy fully grown corms to plant.

Bob

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November 14, 2019

Witch Hazel blooming in the snow

Filed under: Flowers,Insects,Shrubs,Weather — Tags: fall flowering shrubs, flowering shrubs, Late fall, owlet moth, Snow on flowers, Winter flowers, Witch Hazel — bob @ 5:08 pm

Even though the meteorologists had it in their forecasts, the recent big snow and cold temperatures still took us all by surprise. With normal highs in the low fifties and lows in the mid-thirties, some parts of the natural world were caught unprepared too.

I’m sure our witch hazel bush wasn’t expecting over a half-foot of snow and temperatures down in the single digits. Late fall is the normal blooming time for witch hazel. Sure enough, there it was, blooming in the middle of all that extreme weather.

We have our witch hazel planted near a window so we can enjoy its flowers indoors while looking outside.

In addition to flowering in November, witch hazel is kind of unusual for a native plant in that it has both seeds and flowers on its branches at the same time.

The seeds that are present this fall are from flowers that were pollinated last fall. They begin developing in late fall then over-winter on the plant. The following spring the seeds begin growing again and develop into a full-mature seed in the fall. Once the seeds are mature, they are ejected from their seed capsules with a pop! that sends them many feet away. It really is a fascinating plant.

One question you might have is,if witch hazel flowers in the fall when it’s cold outside, how are they pollinated ? All of the bees, wasps, flies, ants or other usual pollinators are not flying or dormant this time of year.

It turns out there are moths that stay active during freezing weather. These moths belong to the owlet moth family (Noctuidae). They fly at night looking for sources of nutrition such as tree sap. And it just so happens witch hazel nectar is a perfectly acceptable food for them. Just like bees, when the moths feed on the nectar, they also inadvertently move pollen around allowing pollination to occur.

We rarely see these moths because they fly at night. I remember back when I was a young kid, I once saw some moths flying in the cold weather. It struck me at that time as being pretty odd.

So did the early snow bury the owlet moths and prevent witch hazel pollination this year? Probably not, the witch hazel was blooming well before the snowstorm and probably were already pollinated by that time.

Bob

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November 7, 2019

Planting bulbs in the fall for spring color

Filed under: Flowers — Tags: Fall Planting, hori-hori, Planting flowers, Spring bulbs, vernalization — bob @ 4:47 pm

Beginning gardeners may not realize that all of those beautiful tulips and daffodils that we see in the spring started out as bulbs that were planted in the fall.

Why couldn’t someone just get some bulbs and plant them in the spring like a potato and let them grow and bloom? Plants need certain conditions in order to grow and reproduce.

Flowering is part of the reproductive process, a distinct part of the life cycle of a plant. In order for that to happen, some plants require a cold period of a certain length. Bulbs need at least 12 weeks or even longer in order for the reproductive process to be triggered. Horticulturists call this cold treatment of plants “vernalization”.

Bulb producing plants that are planted in the fall are sometimes called “hardy bulbs”. Spring flowering bulbs like tulips, daffodils, crocus, hyacinths and many others fall into this category.

With just a few exceptions, all hardy bulbs should be planted in a well drained site where no standing water occurs at any time. If they’re kept high and dry, they will be more likely to survive from year to year.

I’ve had very little success in keeping a population of tulips going for any more than a few years even in sites that seemed to be perfect. However, years ago I had one small planting that did quite well in a sandy spot with very little topsoil. Daffodils and other bulbs are a different story, they can establish themselves permanently much easier.

Bulbs often come with instructions on the package on how how deep to plant and how far apart. The instructions will say something like, “plant the bulbs six inches deep”. Even gardening books and websites give the same advice. But what does that mean? Six inches to the bottom of the bulb or to the top of the bulb?

If the directions say “six inches deep”, that means the bottom of hole itself is about six inches deep. So larger bulbs like daffodils or tulips get covered with about four inches of soil. Small bulbs are planted shallower and are covered with about two inches of soil.

It may seem like a simple detail but always plant bulbs right-side up with the root end at the bottom and the top facing up, not sideways or upside-down.

There are gardeners who like to dig out the entire bulb planting area to the required depth and place their bulbs where they want them in the dug out area. They then cover everything back up. This works fine if the soil in the area has good tilth and is easy to dig. How big an area that is practical mostly depends on the gardener’s stamina.

Most gardeners prefer to dig small individual holes for each bulb. Many kinds of tools have been invented for this chore but the humble garden hand trowel is still the most used.

A garden knife or “hori-hori” works great to cut through plant roots in the soil. This one has depth markings.

Before planting, open up your package of bulbs and place each on the surface where you intend to plant it. To most people, bulbs look best if they are placed to look like they came up on their own rather than in straight rows. Resist the suggestion to toss the bulbs randomly to achieve that result, bulbs are somewhat fragile and may be bruised when dropped.

Place the bulbs in the spots where you intend to plant them. Here’s a mix of tulips and daffodils.

Once you’ve decided on a planting scheme, dig a hole to the proper depth and place the corresponding bulb at the bottom of the hole and cover it up. After a while you get a feel for it and will fall into a rhythm so the job is not so tedious.

If you are planting thousands of bulbs like I used to do, you may have to break out the big guns to help you with the job. An electric or gas powered drill with a two-and-a-half or three inch diameter soil auger chucked into it is a good investment for large expanses of bulbs.

Happy gardening! Bob

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