My whole hand is a blister
My parents sent me the most wonderful gift for my birthday this past week – 300 tulip bulbs. French Blend and Big Eartha, pictured below, from Colorblends.com.
I can’t tell you how excited I am to be able to look forward to massed swathes of color in the Spring – I had wanted some tulips so badly, but then could only afford two bags of ten, plus some little grape hyacinths. So all together, I had 385 bulbs to plant today. I thought I could get that done in a couple hours.
Wrong. Turns out that the whole yard is not the lovely, fluffy sandy loam I had worked with in the back yard, but a soil so dense and compacted that I think they probably drove trucks over it at one point. I spent upwards of five hours hacking at that soil and picking away at it with my sharpest trowel. At one point I wrapped my hand in packing tape in a measly attempt to forestall a whole-palm blister.
In the end, I think I only got about 200 of the 385 in the ground today.
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I don’t care. Big masses of bright warm color ringing the ground under our big blooming dogwood. Big cheery patches of pink poking up from the looks-like-dead garden beds under a grey, grey sky. Tulips like a blanket throughout the bed on the walk up to the house.
It’s going to be totally worth it. |
November 15th, 2009 at 5:56 pm
so sorry the front yard soil isn’t the same as the back. maybe with the addition of all those raked leaves, you can start getting it mellow…