September: time to plant up pots for spring flowering!

Gardening is not, generally speaking, an "instant" activity. We are usually thinking ahead in terms of weeks, months, seasons, years, decades.... which is why, incidentally, most professional gardeners detest garden makeover shows on tv, because they are all about instant results, with no thought for the future: and they give the non-gardening public quite the wrong idea! 

Ground Force is the usual example: a fantastic show, great presenters, and yes, it got a lot of people interested in their garden, which is a good thing: in fact, it's a great thing, but it also did a lot of harm to us "real world" gardeners, because Clients would expect us to magically transform their gardens, overnight. I was once actually called and asked to do some "emergency gardening" : I went along to have a look at their neglected, barren, untidy, hideous garden, to be told that they were having a garden party the following weekend, and wanted it "made over" in time for this very important event. I managed not to laugh in their faces, but they honestly thought that one, lone, gardener could retrieve what looked like a decade of neglect, in one afternoon. I think not.

It also raised unrealistic ideas about how a garden should look, when it has just been restructured, redesigned, or "made over" - because they invariably over-stuff the garden with plants, to get that instant effect. There was never any mention made of aftercare, or the ongoing maintenance of the newly made over garden.

In fact, they did start a spin-off, whereby one of the presenters returned to a garden a year or so later: but they were inevitably in a dreadful state, so the series was pulled after, I think, just a few shows. No-one wants to see a failed make-over, after all - and no-one wants to see all the hard work that is required to retrieve an over-planted garden, once it has returned to the wild.

All of which is a rather long-winded introduction to the concept that now, in early Autumn, we need to think about our spring-flowering bulbs.

And this is in my mind, because this week, it was time for the annual "refreshing of the pots" in one of "my" gardens.

The owner has a long row of large terracotta pots along a narrow bed in front of their house, so they like to have splashes of colour there, all year round, to cheer up the approach.

At this time of year, the summer bedding is pretty much finished, so it's time to refresh the pots, and plant them up with spring-flowering bulbs, ready for next year.

 First job: check out the summer planting, and decide what, if any, is worth saving.

In this case, the wallflowers were in quite nice condition, and a couple of the other things, but most of it  was definitely looking tired.

So, out with the old: using a trowel, I carefully removed all the planting.

This revealed the dry, exhausted compost.

The very top layer went into the compost bin, along with the various small weeds: once below that, the tired compost was scattered on the surrounding beds, to mulch down as general "soil conditioner".

Here are the rescued plants - they are a bit like gigantic plugs! 

I took a little time to clean out the surface weeds, a there's no point putting them back into fresh compost.

Now we turn to the pot: having emptied out most of the old, tired, compost, I added a small handful of fish, blood and bone, then a layer of nice fresh multi-purpose compost.

When filling decorative pots or troughs, I don't like to use garden compost, ie home-made compost, because - alas - it's invariably full of weed seeds, because our domestic compost pens just don't achieve the heat needed to kill them all off.

This doesn't matter too much in the garden, because that gets weeded anyway, and there is a lot of competition from the existing plants: but in a freshly planted pot, the weeds will will have all winter and all that lovely fresh compost, in which to grow and thrive... so I prefer to use just clean, new, multi-purpose compost, bought in.

Having added a layer of compost, in go the bigger bulbs, in this case Tulips: my favourite, Queen of Night, to be exact.

These are beautiful dark, dark purple ones. Lush!

As you can see, I space them out roughly in a circle, and I try to get them not quite touching each other, but I don't usually bother to try to stand them all up on their bottoms, pointy end upwards.

If you wish to do this, just push them gently, half-way down, into the soft compost, then trickle a couple of handfuls on top, being careful not to disturb them.

Bearing in mind that I have a dozen of these pots to get through, I don't have time to faff about, so I just bung them in, and cover them up!

Having added more compost, and firmed it down gently, I can then add the next layer of smaller bulbs: this is sometimes referred to as "lasagne bulbs" or  "a lasagne pot" which is a slightly pretentious way of saying "layered".

You can see that I have laid out an outer circle of smaller bulbs - mostly allium - with a central group.

Allowing for the way the pot sides slope outwards, this means that this layer of bulbs is not directly above the lower layer - so the tulips will come through the gap, without pushing the allium out of the way.

More compost is added, and firmed down: and then the saved plants are re-planted in the very top layer of compost.

To ensure that I don't damage the bulbs below, I firm down a layer of compost above the smallest bulbs, sit these "plugs" on top, then carefully work the compost around them, rather than digging into the surface.

Now that it's fully planted, I can water it in well, and that pretty much sets it up for the winter.

 Sometimes there is a decorative mulch to be added, instead of plants: sometimes there will be a circle of wire mesh, if there is no planting, in order to prevent small mammals - squirrels are the usual culprits - from digging up the bulbs over the winter.

In my case, I now repeat these steps for all the other pots, and then that's that job jobbed (as my Client always says!) and my work here is done until next spring, when we will all enjoy the bulbs!

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