Bulb work

This last week has been a busy one in the gardens. While wandering around Sam's Club we spotted some prettily boxed tulip and scilla bulbs. Our front garden area always looks a little peaked in spring, so we picked up a box. It sat around the garage a couple days before I busied myself with planting them. It turns out there were 70 bulbs altogether. Most ended up in the area under the front window. When I figured that area had probably been over planted, the remainder ended up along the walkway to the front step.

Two days later (with Fran's permission) I dug up a clump of day lilies in the garden strip along the back of the house. Buy the time I was done splitting and replanting I ended up with 21 plants. In the midst of this little project, I also dug up some irises from along the back fence and relocated them to a line behind the lily areas. We had one iris bloom this year, the first time in several years. I'm hoping that their relocation will encourage more growth as the fence line is pretty much ignored and gets little water.

Yesterday Fran joined me, or I her, to split and replant the daffodils along the south garden space, which itself is in need of something. Like a total replanting as it is nothing but ground cover, strawberries which the birds get to before us and field bindweed (no fun there). The daffodils themselves haven't bloomed well the last couple of years, and not at all this year. Leaves came up, but no flowers. We dug up about a 20 foot row and found hundreds of healthy bulbs. We cleared the row of all other plants and put in three staggered rows of bulbs. By the time we were done we still had a fair number of bulbs left over. They ended up in the front garden area in spaces left over after the tulip/scilla work. Some ended up in the north side garden. I'm going to hit all the planting areas with some Miracle Gro before winter sets in and hope for the best.

In the afternoons, while sitting on the deck sipping a beer, I noticed how pretty some of the changing leaves looked when backlit by the sun. Out came the camera to kill off several trillion electrons in an attempt to capture the colors. The results are on Shutterfly in the "Backside of Fall" album.

Today is Aurora's Pumpkin Fest. Every year, in addition to the usual fall and Halloween related events like the pumpkin patch and ghost stories in the barn, they hold the Jack-O-Launch. There the gourds are hurled through the air by several different classes of machines manned by teams of people. The machines' efficiency is graded on distance and linear accuracy, by class -- air cannon, slingshot, catapult or trebuchet. The teams are scored on costume and associated performances. If the predicted rain holds off, I'll try to get some decent video later today.