The Bulb Planting Project - Part One

Getting started - October 22

Every year we are offered a donation of flower bulbs from the Parks and Trees Foundation, for the beautification of our park, and this year was no exception. There is plenty of space in the park to have bulbs coming up.

Click here to see the list of bulbs that were able to choose from. Also look for the names of the ones we did choose to see what they look like.

We ordered almost 100 of each of these:

• Thalia - An ‘heirloom’ daffodil dating back to 1930. White petals and trumpet. 2-3 fragrant blooms per stem. 14” tall.

• Hawera - 12 – 15” tall with many lemon yellow blooms. A good naturalizer.

• Chionodoxa luciliae - Gentian blue flowers with white centers on 8” stems. A super naturalizer, great layered with daffodils.

This year, we decided that a good place to have some bulbs would be around the new park sign. And we wanted the grade five and six class from the Perth Ave. Public School to help us with this project.

Our new friends from GreenHere offered to help us with the bulb planting if we wanted to make an event out of it. So, that we did. See our Bulb Planting Event Poser

The evening before (Oct. 22), a few of the gardeners got together, and we marked out the places that we wanted the bulbs to go, and used our shovels to dig the marked areas. We made a wide circle around the sign, on both sides of the fence, and marked out a checker board pattern. We cut the grassy soil in alternating blocks.

To Naturalize means to bring into conformity with nature, or as a verb : to become established as if native. It could also mean temporally making the green park grass look more like a meadow. And that is our goal, to make this grouping of bulbs to grow around the new sign, in a way that looks more natural, and in this case, the natural way that these types of Daffodils would look growing in the wild. We would not be making a formal garden bed around the sign.