And since I was sitting in a bed surrounded by weeds I pulled them up even if they weren't sitting on an area I planned to fill with bulbs.
Faster Planting - Use Trenches and Layers
Second - if you use the trench method of planting (as opposed to digging 3000 individual holes) it allows you to do a few other things that will help to guarantee a good spring show.
For instance, you can protect your bulbs from burrowing critters by laying hardware cloth (with half-inch holes) over the bulbs you have laid down. The holes will allow the bulb foliage and flowers to poke through - but they are too small to allow those burrowing devils to get at your bulbs.
Another thing you can do using this method is to layer your bulbs. I admit, I remembered this one accidentally, as I wandered the yard with a huge bag of miniature yellow daffodils and one of the 5 bags of 100 grape hyacinths that I needed to find homes for. I finally decided to go for the gold and do a massive planting of yellow daffs - from big trumpets to minis, in the woodland area I'm slowly developing.
Create Winning Bulb Combinations
As I was digging my trench I remembered a small area that stood out last year, with small yellow daffs and bright blue muscari growing together. It was gorgeous. So I laid the daffs at the bottom of my trench, sifted some soil over them to raise the hole's level to the proper depth for muscari and then laid the muscari bulbs down in a drift above the daffs. THEN I refilled the hole. This will not only give me a more intense look next spring - it allowed me to dispose of twice as many bulbs while digging a single trench.
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