For a complete database of planting and full site description: http://myfolia.com/gardens/52043-runges-auto-shop-garden
GOAL: PLANT SPRING BULBS
Planting spring bulbs today. Mostly working in the parkway so I have a squirrel concern. When I purchased the bulb at Anton's, I asked about squirrels and learned tulips are the main attraction for them, Burying them as deep as you can get away with is good to help the problem.
8" was my goal, which seems pretty deep for parkway digging. I also asked at the shop and was told the squirrel action tended to be in a parkway I wasn’t working on, where there are 2 mature hackberry trees. As I dug along, I did find enough squirrel treasure (walnut here, peanut there) to know they are active in the areas where I planted but after a week temps have sunk to freezing at night and I haven’t noticed any bulbs dug up so I’m hoping there’s a bright side to winter’s earlier and harsher tendencies this year.
I was using a crappy trowel I like for these ultra public spaces (lots of saturday traffic with people in and out of the Howard train/bus station). It’s aluminum and I wouldn’t care much if someone walked off with it so I like the low pressure of using that trowel but it isn’t very strong. Digging as much as 8" down was tough (and really I went further where I could because I tried to amend as much soil below planting depth as I could). the trowel handle kept bending. Tim Runge offered to do some welding to reinforce for me while i ran back home to get some gloves and lunch. He did such a cool job! Put a big bolt snug inside the handle underside and welded it. The rest of the afternoon’s digging went much better
:)
Lumbricus terrestris
One interesting event was how the earthworms (Lumbricus / nightcrawler) kept coming up through the grass on the outer circumference of where I was digging just like our earthworm lab where we use the mustard solution to extract and count.
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| Tried to watch for the worms to put them back into the planting areas because from needing organic matter to structure, this soil can use all the help it can get and I was THRILLED to be seeing the worms. |
SOIL HETEROGENEITY
Interesting timing with my classroom lectures this week because in both my classes we’ve talking about soil properties and increased soil heterogeneity in urban areas is a mainstay. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen so much disparity. Around each tree there was clearly a heavy clay side to the north (far side from the curb) and on the south side of the trees I found very sandy soils, no doubt from some disturbance as the gas company made big cuts to lines this past summer and filled in with mostly sand. I added a lot of fallen trees from the maple saplings in any cuts I made with the bulbs and added some top soil where I could. I was working on a Saturday, busy day at the shop, and 2 of the trees are adjacent to where cars pull up. And parking up on the curb is the convention here so I really minimize my time near the curb where there’s any open parking space and try not to spend a lot of time just avoid being a pest to the business.
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| high clay content (nice long ribbon formation!) |
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| Higher sand content with proximity to curb |
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| To help balance soil heterogeneity I mixed the clay & sandy fills and added purchased soil below the digs to consider the needs for bulb root growth. And then I crossed my fingers and will keep them that way through winter! |
