After Mass I headed to Walmart yesterday to pick up a few necessities – cat litter, apples, lettuce, you know the drill. There’s always something running out or about to run out in any home. On a hunch, I meandered into the garden center area. It was a mess. They were unpacking Christmas ornaments and artificial trees, lights and garland. Walmart employees in blue smocks scurried hither and yon with price guns in hand like they were about to have a shoot out at the OK Corral. Lots of shouting and bubble wrap flying.
And there at the end of an aisle…bulbs. Spring bulbs. With 50% off stickers on them and a huge sign that read: All Bulbs. Clearance. $2.50
Wait, that can’t be right….it was right Quick as a wink, your frugal gardening friend snapped up four bags of bulbs. One bag of Apricot Impression tulips, two of mixed dutch iris, and one bag of crocus bulbs. Something like 105 spring flowers for about $10. It doesn’t get any better than that. It can get a tad bit cheaper – I’ve hit sales at the dollar store like this, but nothing at Walmart or Lowes this cheap.
I spent Saturday weeding, thinking we were going to work on the flower garden paths. No dice. I worked for five hours hauling up the amazingly resilient weeds that grew up around the pile of slates we’d had delivered over a year ago. There are now sapling trees there – sumacs and a loblolly pine. I’m going to need helping getting those out and reclaiming the area.
My hard work paid off, however, since Sunday’s find at Walmart needed a home. Now I have two new spots of color to anticipate in the spring. The best part is that we planted bulbs that bloom early (crocus), mid (iris), and late (Darwin hybrid tulilps), so I will have continuous blossoms starting in late March, God willing, all the way through May.
That is, if the deer don’t eat the tulip flowers, the rabbits and squirrels don’t get the bulbs, and it doesn’t snow like it did last year, covering the lot of ’em…
We also ordered 200 more daffodil bulbs for the orchard. They should arrive this week. Last year we planted a little over 430 in the orchard, a mixture of daffodils, narcissus and crocus. This year we focused solely on daffodils; given the space to cover, they gave the best show in the spring, and although deer nibbled on them, they mostly left them alone.
I love planting spring bulbs. They give me a much needed boost of color after long cold winters. There’s joy in them. It’s like planting a time capsule, or perhaps a little present marked “Open when the robins arrive.”
The anticipation of spring in little bulbs. I’ve planted some as well and held my self back from the bulb display Sunday when my husband needed to run and get a loooong extension cord–there were already too many things on the to do list to add planting more bulbs.