The Garden gets Frosted - Some Fall Garden Tips and Tricks

Interesting how words can change their meaning when you are a gardener. Before I started playing in the dirt, getting frosted usually meant something I'd do with a fresh baked cake. Or it might mean that I have been royally snubbed by someone. Or that I'm having my hair streaked.

But in the garden it means only one thing - that the season is ending, someof the annuals and tender perennials are looking really sick - and there are chores to do in the yard.

Only today did I realize how valuable actually being able to get out and garden can be to someone who has a column to write every week. As I started planting a small mountain of bulbs today I found myself taking all kinds of mental notes about things I should be certain to pass on to anyone reading this week's piece.

In reality, being forced to take mental notes like that probably benefits me more than anyone else. The act of mental note-taking actually makes me a better and more knowledgeable gardener than I might be if I merely dug my holes and planted my bulbs without taking any note of anything except how many I still had left to plant.

Almost the first thing that I noticed was that I could eliminate a lot of hole digging by layering the bulbs.

While most of us usually dig hundreds of holes for hundreds o bulbs, I dig trenches - roughly oval shaped areas 6-8" deep, and then lay the large bulbs on the bottom, arranging them so that they will form a drift of a single color when they bloom.

My first bulbs today were actually gigantic - a split corona daffodil called Palmares - white with a pink perianth. So the digging (and to be honest I chopped the hole out of the ground with a mattock because I always have lots of rocks to pry up first) had to go pretty deep.

That's when I realized that I could save myself some trouble - and probably get a better color display - if I then planted the small early daffodil 'Baby Moon' in a layer above 'Palmares'. So in some of my trenches I layered small daffodils with large ones, in others I might lay daffodils on the bottom and then a layer of small tulip bulbs, which don't need to be planted as deeply. I could also add a top layer of crocuses, snowdrops or other small bulbs, which can be planted even more shallowly - and so get triple duty out of a single trench.

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