No gardening over the weekend. Saturday I cut and stacked firewood after taking Lisa to the airport. Sunday rained all day.
One more package from Dutch gardens today. Their website listed hardy (zone 4) glads, and also grecian windflowers rated for zone 4 instead of the usual zone 7. We’d been reading about people wintering over glads in zone 5, so it seemed plausible. Also we’d seen a Canadian site that claimed zone 4 windflowers. So, one last buy.
They came today and they’re in the ground: The windflowers are over-planted on the peony flowered tulips, the glads over by the path leading from the bridge to the pergola.
That makes 1050 bulbs, plus van Engelen’s generosity. Probably 1100. That’s too many. Five hundred is a manageable number, and the Home Depot ones aren’t enough cheaper than van Engelen to make up for the lower quality. (Not bad, better than a lot of hardware store bulbs I’ve seen, just not up to van Engelen’s level. If we’d bought our good bulbs from say White Flower Farm, I’d be feeling a lot better about Home Depot’s price/quality ratio.
Dutch Gardens BTW seems also to be ‘good home center’ quality. Similar prices too, but no home center can match the selection.
I’ve spread three cartloads of compost on the big bed in the driveway island. I figure it will take two more, which will pretty much use one of our three bins of ready compost. I’m taking from a bin we’d really expected for the spring (we’ve still got potatoes in the fall bin) and not sifting it. I can see the difference, but it should be ok. It’s got six months to weather after all. We had ten more yards of bark mulch delivered Thursday. That will go over top, and then repeat the performance in the main garden. Dunno when the firewood gets stacked. We shouldn’t actually use more than 5 yards of mulch, but this way it will be aged and ready for next year.
The older compost fork broke off right at the D handle as I was using it. It looked like there was an eight inch of good wood and the whole center was rotten. I guess water got in sometime, but it was all dry when it actually broke. I’m glad we bought the new one last month.
