The garden of a thousand snowdrops begins with the planting of the first bulb.

I came up with that particular line of Zen after spending a week planting snowdrop bulbs – over a thousand of them. Each one individually planted in it’s own individual hole bored with the handle-end of a wooden spoon. I’m not really sure if I could face doing that again, it was a very long and tiring week.

There are two states you can plant snowdrops in – the first is planting the snowdrop bulbs in Autumn but another way is to plant snowdrops “in the green”, that is snowdrops that have been lifted from the soil in spring (after they have flowered) and have green leaves – so planting them as plants.

I’m aware of the whole planting bulbs v.s. planting in the green arguments for snowdrops but in the end decided to go for bulbs as they seem to be cheaper – unit for unit – than plants in the green. As it took me a week to get all the bulbs in, bulbs that were waiting to be planted were kept in water half the time and drained for the other half. I figured this would keep the bulbs from drying out without risking them rotting, especially if the very last bulbs to go in were waiting around for a week.

I’m very glad this particular Autumn job is done now and I hope to enjoy the show in late winter. I don’t know how many out of the thousand will survive, grow and flower but it had better be a lot of them. Meanwhile, I’ll be keeping the soil where the bulbs were planted (most of the borders) moist to stop the bulbs from drying out.

There will definitely be pictures for the spring, but I won’t be counting.