Problems and Pests
If you plant bulbs where they don’t stand in soggy mud or water, you’ll have little loss from rot. But if you’re in a suburban or rural area inhabited by cute chipmunks, squirrels, or mice, you won’t want to plant juicy morsels such as tulips, crocus, and eranthis just to feed the animals. I’ve never had the time or patience to plant bulbs in wire cages. Poison baits can be dangerous when you have children or pets. An effective safety measure is to put the bait inside a clean milk bottle and cover it with a heap of straw or leaves, with evergreen branches to hold the heap in place.
Winter Protection
Because the root systems may not be completely matured, newly planted bulbs should be mulched with a light, airy covering of something like salt hay during their first winter. After that, the necessity for protection varies with hardiness and with climate. Sometimes these mulches hold in more moisture than is good for bulbs. If alternate freezing and thawing should heave the shallow roots up through cracks in the soil, press them back gently but firmly and cover with soil again.
PROPAGATING MINIATURE BULBS INDOORS
Whether they’re to be exhibited in competition at a flower show, or displayed for close-up enjoyment in the living room, uniform perfection is the objective. First, then, buy the finest-quality bulbs available—the most plump, firm, healthy bulbs you can find. If the catalogue listing includes “recommended for forcing” or “specially treated for forcing,” so much the better.
Time for potting, and length of time required for rooting, vary with the varieties. We’re usually potting up bulbs for forcing through most of October, occasionally into the first week of November. Our favorites are potted at two-week intervals, so we’ll have a continuous show of flowers in winter and early spring.
We prefer clay pots because of their porosity, and shallow pots because most miniature bulbs are shallow-rooted. A generous layer of pebbles or broken crocks goes in the bottom of every pot. The potting soil is a house-plant mixture with a teaspoon of lime mixed in for a six-inch bulb pot. Bulbs are set so their tips are barely covered with soil; then pots are set in water up to the rims to make sure both soil and pots are thoroughly moist.
Before they can be forced into flower, bulbs need time to grow sound root systems. They need to be stored cool, and in the dark so that premature top growth won’t be encouraged.
Our potted bulbs are pre-rooted in the cold frame, the pots sunk in the soil, each pot covered by another pot turned upside down over it. Soil is added to cover the top pots; and after severe weather sets in, we top with at least six inches of salt hay.