After a long rainy week, the rain has finally stopped long enough for me to get into the garden. The amount wasn’t too huge, we got 30 liters, but it was spread over the 4 days making it impossible to garden. So after one dry day, I decided to go and do as much work as I could. If there’s one thing I’ve learned after all these gardening years is that in September and October I always have to garden like there will be rain tomorrow. So today I took all the seeds and bulbs I had to sow and plant and went in…or I should say I dived in. 

Although yesterday was dry the garden is still completely soaked and doing any work was extremely difficult. 90% of the time the weight of my boots was at least 5 kilos each. Removing the mud was even worse because immediately as my shoes were clean I’d start sliding along the garden and falling so I just continued carrying the mud around.

I decided to start with bulb planting. Last week my spring tulips and daffodils finally arrived so now it was time to plant them. The bulbs are amazing, huge, and healthy. I honestly don’t remember when was the last time I got such big tulip bulbs. Usually, the ones that are sold in our stores are small and poor health, but these ones are amazing. 

As soon as I got into the garden I noticed that the plan with my spring garden bed will not be doable. The bed which I’ve dag past week looked exactly like I’ve left it. The rain did absolutely nothing to the soil, except make it even more sticky. The lumps stayed the same and there was no way I’d be able to plant my bulbs here. 

I could spend hours breaking the soil and maybe then I’d be able to plant something but I just gave up on this idea. This bed needs to spend the winter like this. The soil needs to freeze, and then it will start crumbling. Planting anything before the soil freezes is just madness and Sisyphus’ work. 

That’s why I needed a different plan and fast, I didn’t have time to dig another bed and leave it long enough for the soil to crumble. I don’t really have a good place to store the bulbs. They needed to be planted today.

After considering a few options I decided to turn my 2 small flower beds into my spring bulb beds. They have been dug many times over the years, the soil is excellent and there’s no need to deep dig it. 

The beds were full of cosmoses but other than that there weren’t many plants on them. I decided this will be a good spot for my bulbs. During the spring they will cover these beds and after they stop flowering the time will be excellent for cosmoses. They will self-seed, cover the beds and won’t be in the way of the bulbs since the cosmos roots aren’t going too deep. This way the beds will be full most of the year. 

I had to work fast because I had more work to do in the garden, harvest my vegetables and I didn’t have lots of time to do it. I didn’t count on the additional 2 beds that needed to be cleaned and prepared when I was doing my daily schedule. So I ran around the garden pulling out the cosmoses and weeds and throwing them on the weed pile as fast as I could. As I mentioned before the mud stuck on the shoes and the slippery garden aren’t the best combination, but I really didn’t have time to slow down. Still, I managed to clean the beds and remove all the cosmos plants. There are still a few plants left in other parts of the garden but for now, they are not in the way. 

After preparing the bed I went to do other garden chores that needed to be done(more in part 2) and after finishing with everything I returned to the bulb planting. The plan was to place the new bulbs on the upper bed and the old ones I dag out of the front yard on the other bed, but like everything today this plan also failed. 

Once I started doing holes for my bulbs I noticed that there’s no way I could plant 120 bulbs on one bed. They were just too big and took too much space to squeeze them all. I finished planting one bed and I still had 60 bulbs left to plant. 

So I changed my plan, again, and planted the tulip bulbs on the lower bed too. The 60 bulbs took 2/3 of the lower bed and now I didn’t have enough room for my old bulbs.

By the time I got to planting my old flower bulbs, I’ve been running around the wet and slippery garden for over 4 hours. It was well past noon and I was exhausted. Also, it was time to take Srećko for a poop walk, make lunch, empty the washing machine, and do some other chores I had planned. On top of everything, the cut I accidentally got on my heel yesterday, opened up again and was bleeding in my shoe, and I still had to harvest the vegetables, so I just gave up. I planted as many bulbs as I could, mostly bigger ones, without sorting them. I just pushed them in the soil. I was so frustrated that if it were possible I’d just dig a hole and dump all of them in the hole. 😆

There was still a bunch of small bulbs when I just ran out of free space. There was no way to squeeze them in anywhere and since most of them are anemones and onions I couldn’t overcrowd the beds and I just decided not to plant them at all. I took them back home.

I’ll return them back to the front yard flowerbed. I’ll plant them in front of the grapevine and take them out again next year. Maybe then I’ll have better luck with a new bulb bed.