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Winter is fast approaching here in Cloggie land, although the unseasonably mild weather is giving us all a false sense of security about how bad the winter may be. One of these days we’re going to wake up to find the car is frozen to the driveway and I’ll have to chip my way in with a pickaxe, but in the meantime we’re practically basking in temperatures around 10-13 degrees C. However the short days mean it’s time to get out into the garden for a last rummage in the dirt, and in Holland, the land of tulips, that means it’s time to plant flower bulbs.
Now let me start by saying that although I enjoy gardening and getting a bit muddy, I can quite confidently say that I’m a fairly crap gardener. My plants don’t flourish; they limp along until a season changes enough for them to flop limply in relief at not having to pretend they will ever live up to the promieses on their labels. The soil around our house is awful – any topsoil was strip-mined and sold off by the developers – and the borders are characterized by either endless shade or desert-like over exposure to the sun.
However these factors haven’t deterred me from spending money on new plants like a pro, and hope, if not my garden, sprouts eternal. In this respect, bulbs are the perfect plants for me. You just chuck them in the ground, do nothing for a few months, and hey presto, you have flowers in the spring time.
Now let me start by saying that although I enjoy gardening and getting a bit muddy, I can quite confidently say that I’m a fairly crap gardener. My plants don’t flourish; they limp along until a season changes enough for them to flop limply in relief at not having to pretend they will ever live up to the promieses on their labels. The soil around our house is awful – any topsoil was strip-mined and sold off by the developers – and the borders are characterized by either endless shade or desert-like over exposure to the sun.
However these factors haven’t deterred me from spending money on new plants like a pro, and hope, if not my garden, sprouts eternal. In this respect, bulbs are the perfect plants for me. You just chuck them in the ground, do nothing for a few months, and hey presto, you have flowers in the spring time.
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I decided to brighten the orchard with daffodils. Having read that the best way to achieve a natural looking placement of bulbs was to literally toss them in handfuls over the area and plant them when they landed, I subsequently spent the next half hour cursing and trying to locate the bloody things again while avoiding the electric fences. Having done that, I pretty much sabotaged my chances of a bumper flower crop by planting them…upside down. For some reason it seemed logical that the pointy bit would stick downwards. With such a hopeless record of bulb planting, who could EVER have guessed I would end up with Dutch nationality??