How Does Your Garden Grow?

I planted my 150 "perennial" tulips over ten inches deep in several areas of the yard. I think it is the deep planting that has made them more slow to bloom than those of my neighbors. Finally the flowers that the rabbits and squirrels have not eaten are blooming.

Half of the blooms by the front railing have been plucked or otherwise destroyed by the critters in my yard. For the third attempt running, there's no sign of the daffodils directly across from these.


The second largest area is in front near the forsythia bush. I had planted some Dutch Irises over top of the tulips, but they have not made any showing there or the other spots where they were planted.

Toward the end last Fall I found I might have over done it with the bulb orders. I ended up planting two sets of 30 and 20 in the grass! They seem to have found their way through the (semi-frozen) turf.


Our apple tree is in full bloom! The yard smells wonderful. Two years ago we had a ton of apples. Last year there were not as many. I tired thinning the apples out and bagged around 60 of them to keep the files from spoiling them. It worked pretty well until I found the squirrels had finished eating/wasting all of the apples up high and started to steal the bagged ones. In the end, we only got about 10 small apples. It seems that me might have a lot more flowers this year than last. I'm guessing we'll see another big crop of apples. The question is, who will get to enjoy them-- us or the squirrels?


I thought my General Sikorski clematis was dead, but some encouragement from the folks at gardenweb proved right. I found 3-4 tiny stems coming up from the base! My Huldine clematis is over two feet high with five stems!