What to Plant Now for Incredible Spring Flowers

Want to have a spring garden full of amazing colour? Then you need to put in the work now to reap the rewards. Bulb planting happens in the fall so that once the spring sunshine warms the soil, the amazing tulips, daffodils and hyacinths that we all love start to bloom. Here are my easy pointers on how you can put on a show this spring.

When bulb shopping at the local garden centre, choose large healthy bulbs free from splits and blemishes. Even if you decide to order online or via a catalog, make sure to order odd numbers of bulbs for your garden. Natural rarely works in even groupings and sets of 3,5 or 7 always look best when planting bulbs.

Although spring flowers love warm temperatures and lots of sun, the bulbs prefer it cool. Make sure that you don’t start planting your bulbs until the evening temperatures have dropped below freezing for several nights in a row. This will help chill the ground, ensuring that your bulbs don’t start to bloom at the wrong time of the year.

Tulips traditionally are the most popular spring flower, but remember that these little gems are a prized favourite of squirrels and chipmunks. They specifically look for the freshly turned soil in the garden to steal your bulbs. Often they will dig them up and eat the tops off every single bulb, effectively undoing all of your hard work.

Add daffodils and hyacinths to your garden mix. They often bloom at different times that your tulips and squirrels avoid eating them. The bulbs and blooms of these plants taste terrible to small rodents so if you’ve had troubles in the past, these flowers are an easy fix.

To plant your bulbs, dig a flat-bottomed hole to the depth on the packaging. Most tulips prefer a hole that is 3x’s the size of the bulb; often around 6 inches deep. Ensure that you hole has a flat bottom to help with drainage but also to keep the blooms at a consistent height in your garden bed.

Plant the bulbs with the tips up/roots down but consider turning a few on their sides. This will delay the show a little longer in the garden because the ones on their sides will take longer to grow.

A safe and environmentally friendly way to deter squirrels is to add a layer of simple chicken wire on top of the bulbs, before you add the soil. This prevents squirrels from pulling the bulbs out of the ground because they won’t fit through the mesh of the wire. Come spring, the stems grow right through as if nothing was there. Just make sure to bury the mesh when you fill the hole so that you aren’t looking at wire in the garden all year long.

Put lots of bulbs in those awkward shaded places near tree roots. Bulbs usually bloom and are done before the leaves of the trees even emerge. This way they get all of the sun that they need to get ready for the following year, ensuring that your garden will look amazing for many springs to come!