Confessions of a Too-Busy Gardener

In theory, after I "planted" daffodils in our window boxes last spring, I had only one thing to do with the pots of bulbs last fall: sink them into the garden, pots and all, in hopes that I would be seeing this poking through the surface of the garden this spring:   

In reality, this happened: 

Yep, those are the pots of bulbs, exactly where I left them in November - all lined up and ready to be dug into the ground.  The job probably would have taken less than 10 minutes to do, but since I didn't even have time to think about fall yard work or garden clean up until mid-November, it just didn't happen (kind of like my failed attempt at overwintering my brussels sprouts).

My biggest fear was that our bitter cold winter did the bulbs in without the extra in-ground insulation from the relentlessly frigid air we had in January and February, but it appears that I lucked out on this one.  They are just starting to send up little green shoots (see first photo). I guess I should be less crabby about all that snow cover, huh?

But that's not my only confession.

Remember how I also wanted to get some additional bulbs planted in pots for the window boxes last fall?  Well, this is what happens when you have your mom save you a big bag of daffodil bulbs and she gives them to you just a few days before election day:

Yep, these bulbs didn't even make it into pots, let alone the garden.  I stashed them in plain sight in my kitchen so I wouldn't forget about them and could plant them as soon as the election was over, but again, it just never happened.  

For those keeping score, that's a total of three fall garden fails, four when you count the fact that I never got around to planting any garlic last fall either.  

Fortunately, gardening can be pretty forgiving.  We tend to think that we have to do everything just right, but the truth is that there's a lot of room for human error.  Yes, I didn't tend to my bulbs like I should have last fall, but somehow spring found a way, so when I noticed the daffodils starting to poke out of my line of pots last night, I immediately went to find the bag of bulbs in the house. With rain and slush in the forecast for the next three days, and (hopefully) warmer temperatures on the horizon for next week, I figured the sooner I did something with these bulbs, the better my odds of still seeing some flowers this spring.  

I went ahead and divided both the pots of bulbs and the bare bulbs between the two window boxes.  I carefully spaced them out, first digging the pots into the soil just deep enough to be flush with the surface of the soil,  and then placing the bulbs in between the pots.  Since the bulbs are already growing, I didn't want to bury them too deep, so I made sure that the bulbs were planted just deep enough that the new growth was just poking out of the ground (I figure this will also make it easier to pull them out again later, because I WILL plant them properly next fall).

I made sure the window boxes were thoroughly watered and now there's nothing to do but wait for them to grow.  It's not exactly how I planned on filling the window boxes with daffodils this spring, but if it works, it just goes to show that my idea of having spring bulbs in my window boxes is not nearly as difficult as I was led to believe.  It's also a good reminder to my perfectionist self that sometimes it's okay if some things just don't happen exactly the way I plan.