Video: Plant Bulbs in the Fall

If you endure a long winter each year — and even if you don’t — you owe it to yourself to plant bulbs this fall so you can enjoy colorful, charming blossoms in the spring. With our crazy winters, I always feel I deserve those blooms!

This year’s bulb-planting almost didn’t take place for me. I ordered my bulbs quite a few months ago but they just arrived a few days ago. Ordinarily, that wouldn’t be an issue but this year, Mother Nature has decided winter should come early. What kinds of things did I order? I decided to choose new-to-me bulbs this time around:

Crown Imperial fritillaries (Fritilleria imperialis) rubra maxima, Asiatic lilies ‘Forever Susan’ (I mean, why not?!), Foxtail lilies (Eremurus) ‘Romance’, rock garden irises (‘Katharine Hodgkin’ and ‘Sheila Ann’), species tulips (‘Dasystemom’) and “green tulips” (Viridiflora) ‘Artist’.

While I was in the process of ordering most of these bulbs from John Scheepers, I discovered they carry herbaceous peonies and specifically one that I’ve been hoping to find: ‘Red Charm’. Bill and I saw them in the RHS Wisley Gardens in England. They were trialing them and I immediately fell in love with their gorgeous flowers! So, even though peonies aren’t bulbs, I planted my new one during this video… especially since there’s a very important rule to follow when it comes to planting them and I wanted to make sure you were aware of it.

Now, before I get to the video, I wanted to mention something about my Facebook page. If you happen to follow me there, you’ve probably noticed there haven’t been any new posts from me since Nov. 3. Why? Well, Facebook has caused problems for me once again. Because of all of the controversial posts that many entities have been sharing on Facebook (primarily politically-oriented posts), they wanted all page owners with a decent “reach” (page/post views) to state which country they live in. I thought I had fulfilled their requirement a month ago, but as of the morning of Nov. 3, Facebook has essentially frozen my page until I told them what country I live in.

Simple enough, right? Nope. The page they wanted me to go to for that went to a dead link. So I have been trying all sorts of work-arounds and I believe I finally hit on a way to resolved the matter. I’m supposed to receive a letter (how quaint) from Facebook with a code I can use to reactivate my page. So please bear with me and with a little luck, I should be back in business within a few days. Or at least, I certainly hope so because I love reaching out to all of you and sharing my love for gardening. Ever since last Tuesday, my days have been feeling a bit empty because I’ve been missing all of you!

And one last thing: when a similar issue came up about a month ago (which I was sure I had resolved to their satisfaction), I told my Facebook followers what I was dealing with. Many of them were sure my page had been hacked. To be clear, it has NOT been hacked. All of this has come up because Facebook is under a lot of pressure to better identify where certain types of posts and ads are coming from. I have researched this thoroughly. Unfortunately, I got caught in the crossfire with my happy little gardening page! Go figure.

OK, here’s my newest video about my project to plant bulbs in the fall: