🌷 Time to get spring bulbs, if you can believe it

October advice for your garden, yard, patio or balcony

1. Spring Bulbs

2. Wildflower Meadow

3. Prune Lavender

4. Essentials

5. Save-able List

1. Completely ridiculous - but now is the time to buy your spring bulbs

Fortunately, you don’t need to plant them yet, and I will email to remind you to do that when it’s time.

If you only read one bit of this email: Tulips (and other bulbs) must be planted in autumn/November when literally no normal person is thinking about spring flowers. Buy the bulbs now as they will be harder to get the later you leave it. Bonus: Buying things is easy but it’s some of the work done already 👏 Bulbs are low effort because you can just leave them in the ground and they will bloom again year after year.

• Ground planting: I recommend tulips, native Irish/UK bluebells, camassia and drumstick allium.

• Pot planting: I suggest either a "bulb lasagna" to layer plants that will bloom at different times or go all in with pots filled with tulips. For a bulb lasagna choose some daffodils, crocus, and tulips or alliums. Advice on colours and numbers below. I will explain how to do it in more detail in November.

• Shady spot? Tuilps will not like this but others mentioned tolerate some or even full shade. You could sub in muscari (ok in full shade) or anenome blanda (partial shade).

More advice for your spring bulbs

Pot planting:

• Colours for bulb lasagna: If buying in person, lay the bulb packets out to see if you like the colours together. Swap in/out options until you love the combo. You will look like such a professional doing this. If buying online, maybe take screenshots and swipe back and forth or use a collage app to get a sense of them together. The bulbs will bloom at different times, but I think they should blend or compliment each other for overlap.

• Full tulip pots: Go all one colour per pot to make a strong visual impact, or use shades of one colour for impact and style. For example, a pot of deep red tulips, next to a pot of brighter red tulips, next to a pot of pinky tulips. Or mix the shades across all three pots. No full-on multicolour combos in pots though - that is for tidy towns and supermarket hanging baskets and you are more sophisticated than that now. (They just don’t stand out well, it breaks up the colours too much and dilutes the visual effect.)

• Numbers for bulb lasagna: You’ll have 3 layers of bulbs, with the tulips and daffodils in the deeper layers, crocus on top. Get about enough bulbs to fill a layer as much as you can without the bulbs touching. So if your pot is wider at the top, you’ll need more crocus bulbs. Also because they’re smaller bulbs.

• Number for full tulip pot: If you have a 30cm pot, get 30 bulbs, 40cm pot = 40 bulbs, etc.

Ground planting:

• Make sure to buy native Irish bluebells, check that the species name is Hyacinthoides Non Scripta. Good luck never remembering that! (Don’t worry, it’s what the saveable list at the end is for.) Non-native bluebells (usually Spanish bluebells I think) are stunning, but also invasive and not good for our ecosystem.

• Camassia are great if you adore bluebells but wish they were taller and put on more of a show! They also bloom later, so as your bluebells disappear, these can take their place. And if you get real hungry - you can eat the bulbs!

• If you have a "no mow" or just neglected, overgrown area, the drumsticks alliums will go here when it comes time to plant them. They will make it look fab. Just look. The camassias can definitely be incorporated into this too.

• Tulips will perform best in their first and maybe second year, so you might have to top them up each year. But my goodness are they WORTH IT. Most plants I will recommend will come back year after year, to minimise effort.

2: Want a mini wildflower meadow? Buy this one plant now

The most natural (and easy) way to turn a lawn or small area into a wildflower meadow is plant Yellow Rattle. It's a native plant that reduces the amount of grass. This leaves more room for naturally arriving wildflowers to take root. So even if you don't actually plant any other wildflowers, some surprise ones should emerge later in the year if the rattle has got on ok. And any other wildflowers you plant will have a better chance at success.

3. If you have lavender - time to prune it

This is so important for lavender. Don't cut it all the way back, leave some of the parts with leaves. Think of the green leaves like hair, you're giving it a very tight cut, but we don't want bald, with only branches visible. It may not recover from that. Pruning now prevents the woody/branchy base getting bigger and bigger every year. This is a great example. On the right of the path is the before, the left is after.

4. Some essentials

If you have a garden: Buy a border spade, preferably stainless steel. The standard shovels people have are crap and so much effort to use! You're literally being conned with those things. Border spades cut into even tough grass covered ground like a knife, it's beautiful. This will let you *easily* plant bulbs anywhere when time comes. This one is expensive but I got it as a gift and am in love with it.

To garden in pots: If you don't have good sized pot for your bulbs, B&Q usually have have the best online selection. Freecycle/Adverts.ie/Marketplace can be great too but you can be waiting a while for something you like to come up.

5. Screeenshot-able/Save-able October list

• Prune lavender

• Buy tulips/alliums, crocus, daffodils. (PG)

• Buy drumstick aliums, camassia, native bluebells aka Hyacinthoides Non Scripta. (GG)

• Consider getting a stainless steel border spade for November (GG)

• All purpose, peat-free compost

• Big pot or two if you don’t have any (PG)

GG: Ground Gardener | PG Pot Gardener

And that’s it! If you have anything specific you want advice on or have questions about, reply and let me know! Maybe I can cover it in the next email.