Planting Bulbs in Fall

by Garden Moose

Get a head start on spring gardening by planting bulbs now.

As your summer garden fades into fall and then winter, you should be thinking of spring. You can have beautiful flowers with great greenery and arrangement when you plan in the fall months. When the leaves are falling off of the trees, you should be planting your bulbs for the next spring. You can find a great variety of colors, types and sizes -- bulbs to meet every gardener's dreams!

The bulbs that you plant in the fall will never need to be planted again as they will come up for years to come when you have fertile soil. The only time it might be necessary to dig up your bulbs is when you want to move or change the colors in your flowerbeds.

Spring bulbs and flowers are a great way to get a head start on your beautiful flower beds and to give you a time line to follow in the spring for other gardening planting. Plan ahead when you are thinking about buying new bulbs for your garden. What colors do you like? How many do you want to plant? Do you have a longer or shorter growing season than others?

Let's talk about how to buy bulbs that will fit your garden. There are so many bulbs that are available to buy that you should start researching colors that interest you, then determine what bulbs will fit your growing zone. For example, you could find twenty blue-shaded flowers, but only ten will grow in your zone because of wetness, or amount of sun they receive or even because of how cold it may get at night. If you are going to grow bulbs in the greenhouse you can virtually choose any bulb that you want to grow and then monitor the environment!

A few easy to grow and widely available bulbs such as tulips, crocuses, hyacinths and daffodils are easy choices to start your garden and they are the some of the most reliable. You can plant any of these bulbs in the fall months when the temperatures have cooled down to at least sixty degrees. The bulb root system will be 'born' or 'established' over the winter months.

The closer that it gets to winter, the lower the prices will be on bulbs in local gardening and shopping centers. If you keep your eye on the end on the season sales you can get bulbs for half price or less! That is when you can buy twice the amount of bulbs you were going to and have a huge garden. You can often tell if these bulbs are still 'good', even when they are on sale, by their hardness. If they are hard with no soft spots you can still plant these bulbs and plan on them growing. You will even find some types of bulbs will be growing in the bag, forming roots systems in the minimal amounts of dirt that is provided with some types of bulbs. These bulbs that are growing roots are also o.k. to buy because as soon as you plant them deep enough they will continue growing over the winter months, just slower than what they were growing in the bag, the way that they were meant to grow.

Good luck in finding the colors, the varieties and the sizes of flowers you want in the spring!

Garden Moose is a feature contributor to Greenhouses.com, a leading Internet destination for gardening and greenhouse information and ideas.

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