Frost’s Fickle Fingers / Bulbs All Here 22 October 2008

Frost’s fickle fingers have so far primarily touched the Hawaiian blue eyes, which nearly died one of the coldest nights.  It might frost again tonight.  So far, weirdly, the basil in a pot in the back yard appears fine.  I say ‘weirdly’ because the back yard often feels ten degrees cooler than the front yard.

I waited too long to order from Odyssey, I discovered when I checked their website tonight and read a big red script saying their fall shipping season had ended and the remaining catalog is for reference only.  I guess it’s just as well, as my two small but impressively heavy remaining boxes from Brent and Becky’s arrived today, stuffed with dwarf irises and snow crocuses and alliums and early-blooming daffodils.  I caught a cold yesterday and between that and the crisp weather of late and prioritizing of bringing in tender plants, I have fallen behind on bulb planting.  Now that the heat is on at night and sometimes during the day, it’s getting more urgent too, as there’s nowhere truly cold left to store the bulbs.  (The basement is mildewy and prone to flooding.)  It’s supposed to be 60 F and sunny Friday, so hopefully I’ll be feeling somewhat better by then.  First I need to plant the peonies and the cyclamen, then the snowdrops and crocuses and frits and scilla and muscari, then the daffodils, last the tulips and alliums.  Small early-blooming bulbs and daffodils do best if their roots get established this fall, but tulips prefer the soil to be cool before they go in.

And in the midst of all this frost and rain (it rained on and off yesterday and today) and wind and fluctuating temperatures, the fall-blooming crocuses are going along merrily blooming.  Sometimes they flop over, what with their lesser weatherproofing than their spring relatives, but they recover and keep blooming away.  Crocuses, whether they bloom in autumn, winter, or spring, are the most amazing little creatures to me.  Frost, snow, storms, ice, hot day, cold day, wind – whatever, they just don’t care.  I can hardly imagine a more cheerful little flower, or a better return on one’s value than planting a pack of a kind of crocus that increases over the years.