We Planted 70,000+ BULBS in Our Lawn!!! — Ep. 059

hey guys so yesterday we planted 70 000 bulbs if you could believe it but we had some recruits to help us out because there was no way we could actually finish it in one day by ourselves in early october we got our big delivery of 70 500 bulbs straight from the netherlands luckily we were doing some gate fixes on the land so saunder was able to drop off the delivery closer to where we would be planting we decided we would attempt to plant the bulbs a few different ways first would be taking up the lawn entirely particularly in an area that needed some grading and then we would backfill the area with three to four inches of organic compost topsoil mix which we'd rake over the bulbs evenly all right so we just took up a lot of the sod not all of it in the central part of the lawn we're still continuing with that and the idea is that we're building a bulb coffin there so we're taking up the sod with the turf cutter and then we're scarifying the land with some scarifiers and we're just like prepping it for bulb planting next month but we took all that sod i don't know if you could say we upcycled it but and we drove over it compacted yeah this is going to be um a berm it's going to burn up very similar to this garden bed so we'll just have more biomass down below means we're not taking this to the compost heap we're not taking it to the trash bin we're actually reusing it in the landscape and then we'll put some compost compost topsoil and um composted bark mulch on top of this and will be ready for planting i don't know this year but it will be at least four next year [Music] next would be through the use of a bulb planting machine which bill miller from cornell university and his team was gracious enough to bring over to demonstrate how you can plant thousands of bulbs in just 10 minutes and finally to finish it off we would use bulb augers on cordless power drills to plant bulbs in more sensitive areas like around tree circles and on slopes since we had quite a bit of rain it put a wrench in the topsoil compost delivery plans but we were able to schedule deliveries on drier days too okay so you can see the truck behind me and this was our first load of 20 cubic yards right over there of topsoil compost mix so that's what's going to go on top of some of these planting beds but also where we dug the quote-unquote bulb coffin so we're going to put the bulbs down underneath where we dug and basically straightened out the land leveled out the land and then we're going to be putting three to four inches of that topsoil compost mix on top of the bulbs because we figured that's like the easiest way to plant thousands and thousands of bulbs so we need five more of these and i don't think we have enough space to put them because it's been really rainy and wet and he his tires are already getting stuck in the mud even though we've we've put out piles of wood chips there so saunders gonna get the bobcat and the bucket and he's going to move the soil up so that we could get at least like three or four loads here and then we'll have to figure out what to do with the last two loads basically we waited for the weather reports with baited breath on the big bulb planting day but we really couldn't have asked for better weather and we had a number of good friends and new acquaintances show up to help not to mention terry and steven from stone bend farms even showed up to make the whole crew stone oven pizzas this is basically how the day went down and what are the bulbs that we're planting um roughly speaking let me tell you i worked closely with peggy ann and flowerbulbs.com an educational site for gardeners on all things bulbs to come up with a list of spring bulbs that are less than eight inches tall flower from february through may serve as a great pollinator resource naturalize easily and can work well together as a color palette this included crocus tomasinianus aeranthus anemy blonda chianadoxa fritillaria meliagris muscari tulipo silvestris galanthus and curriculus beth evans those are all more or less the same size which will be very helpful for this this is you know we're looking at it kind of hoping for a 40 coverage on this area i think it's actually will get a little higher a number of bolts per square meter 200 so that's about 20 per square foot that's that's a very nice density right yeah we're gonna have a good show and then is the idea that this is a complete mix right so we mix them before we put them in the hopper absolutely not everything divided up but we still need to hand mix them either in the bucket of the truck or the wheelbarrow if it's big enough all right guys the first thing we should do is to move these over here so everything is all in one what's going to be interesting and i'll just say this is that we we've we've used that machine a lot and we've planted stuff all over long island and up here so we know a fair amount about the machine but i i have to get a sense this is going to be half of the number of bulbs right which is how many bulbs five thousand we're going to make it work we're gonna make it work no problem uh yeah this is about as big as that's about as big as it's gonna get so er everything that's that's gonna be fine okay so basically what we're gonna do is brett came here gosh a couple weeks ago evened this out and then we're basically gonna put some uh put some bulb tone down and we're gonna put the bulbs and then we're gonna create this like we created this bulb coffin and then basically we're gonna put the the soil on top three to four inches and brett is going to graciously move this down and then we're to take hand rakes and rake it in that's that's the plan today we had folks divide up into two separate groups one led by bill and the other one led by dan bulbs were halved as well and then were mixed by each group so that they could be randomly dispersed throughout the lawn area either by hand or through the bulb machine in order to achieve a natural stinson style planting which is the dutch term for describing bulbs and lawn which were often displayed in front of stone and brick homes the nice thing is it is mobile so let's start putting some of that in there because as bread is filling we're gonna have to keep moving lee you're cheating on your roses we won't tell them my mom's thinking i know oh you know i'm thinking i need to under plant the roses oh my god it looks so fun so peg's bringing over buckets so like i say we can just scoop up let's just say half a bucket set it aside and we'll scoop up the next bucket half a bucket set it aside and this will begin to give us a sense of our of what we have to work with i'll keep mixing as we go [Music] i know right i said that yeah this is like the fourth of july in the netherlands right now yeah i mean a really great fourth of july we will split them in such a way that we have three more boxes so that will reduce the the weight of what we have to put into the tractor so that's how many that's 37 35 000. one two three four five six thousand per box and that's about right i mean that's that's about how many five thousand would normally come in a black plastic crate all right team one last review just to make sure we're on the same page this is a path anything that is lawn will remain lawn they're gonna plant over there on that side but this edge is our edge here okay path bulb bed let's hit it [Music] we're gonna have plenty of bulbs up here [Music] i think that's fine all right steel rake time [Music] that's much better that's what we're after what we're doing here is since we're planning so many bulbs in this area rather than drilling hundreds actually thousands of holes to plant these bulbs we're doing it on moss the soil has been peeled back and we've distributed the bulbs different spacing different densities and to that we're adding a mix of compost and topsoil nice light and we're raking a grade about three or four inches over top of that which would ideally be the depth that we would be planting in into the ground but just because we have a good team here we've got a lot of bulbs and a lot of area to cover we're doing it in this sort of mass production style but still mass production by hand and what's the density of bulbs you want because if i look at this area here is that about enough like that is enough for what for what we're after we're after a natural dispersion nature doesn't plant in straight lines nature doesn't plant consistently nature varies and we're trying to replicate nature in that way and in the next few years as some of these bulbs begin to seed that dispersion that density will change it's a dynamic project right here and over the next few years frankly the next potential hundred years it's continually going to continue to change a little a little bit [Music] give me about a quarter of that that's good but brett in general i think you're okay right so you put bulbs over here to the left so he still has to drive we've left the cavity so that he can come in and access once he gets those covered then we're going to plant bulbs in that cavity and we're going to continue to sort of work our way out of this bed because can you step on the boats or will that destroy them we can step on the bulbs if necessary and actually that piece of equipment by virtue of those very large tracks despite its weight has a very gentle footprint so as long as we are gentle in the way we step on the bulbs a human it's absolutely fine even that equipment straight line is fine it's when you begin to move that's where the crushing action happens but basically this is a small bulb on soft ground and certainly when the grade is on top of it there's no problem at all that gets this up to about 10. yeah no that's great it's better it's a lot better yeah okay good good it's always interesting estimating the numbers what was described to me is the exhibition density of bulbs is is that's beautiful but it's sometimes more than what you necessarily need for a nice ecological impact yeah what we're kind of going for is a 40 coverage yeah for this first year which is a big yeah it's a big show yeah oh it's going to be fantastic yeah and all of these uh will multiply quickly i propose that we start in this area first because they're working over there and these uh hills of soil maybe they get knocked down in the meantime so we'll start here first yeah okay so luke we need the tractor over there so we can load in five crates of bulbs into into the uh so this is so exciting i don't know what we're gonna do my my big take on this is that this is really special because bulb people hardly ever see mixes of bulbs i know you know the the big time forcing exporters it's all monoculture it's all and that's fine it's but it's all one kind of tulip but these these things are just this is fantastic yeah beautiful it really is [Music] uh we no we can't start loading things yet because i have to go get the uh the gate i started my advil drip last night [Music] all right what do we have once you finish out this lobe in here this side of the transformer and then we're going to switch gears to soil again [Music] oh god jesus god luke get on it luke [Music] but this is this is 20 000 more or less don't quote me on the numbers there you go now in in holland there are companies that do this this is what they do they plant bulbs under grass all over europe for cities towns municipalities parks and it's really quite interesting because again you end up with these mixes of bulbs and the companies that do this they're pretty advanced and they have unbelievable imagery and public relations and so they'll put in these plantings and by by having different species and cultivars of bulbs you spread out the bloom time from the very earliest like a rant this winter aconite yeah and and crocus all the way through to these tulips at the end yeah so you can get yeah you can get three months almost and they take pictures of the same plantings at intervals and they put those pictures in their pr so that people can see what they look like and they have mixes that that are color scheme that are pollinator friendly everything and they do a very nice job of it and they have very interesting facilities where they have basically like a cement mixer and they have conveyor belts that go into the cement mixer and and you dump 20 crates of this and 10 crates of that and three crates of the other and they all go up there and they tumble around gently and then they let them out so they do all the mixing like a cement mixer kind of yeah and you know it's really interesting people can do this at home too absolutely do it with you know tens of thousands no this is great under deciduous trees and shrubs where they're going to get the light early and you know if you they don't have to mow it you know exactly until the end of june well that's one of the big things is that is that it it reduces the mowing numbers of mowings and we've been you might not know about this but we've been doing research at cornell for the last four and a half years looking at at the earliest mowing date because of course you're not supposed to mow this stuff until the leaves all turn yellow but it turns out that you you can mow things earlier than that with without without affecting future years flowering so research so we we have trials where we have mowed for three years running and this year was the was the third year of return flowering after mowing treatments the year before and well you you yeah yeah i can i can certainly it's it's really quite interesting and when you say mowing how how tall are you leaving the grass well when we when we mow we we mow to be fairly tall because we don't have refined turf grass where these these two particular trials are so we probably mow about three inches tall but the reality is one once you mow a ball these crocus you know when they when they flower a crocus leaf is only four or five centimeters couple three inches long and by the time it gets time to mow it you know it's it's like this so the the height of the mowing i don't think has any effect on on how the bulb perceives that i think once it's been mowed it's all over yeah and then of course the other thing are the pollinators you know you you know the crocus and other really early things because it's it's a turf grass is it's a desert for pollinators right and i see this yard i mean they start early they are all over the crocus they're all over the snowdrops um they love that anemones they are all over the place and they need food early and these are the earliest things this is the earliest thing stuff that's out there for sure for sure and for me it's the food for the soul man i need to see these to know spring's coming yep yeah and and like you said about homeowners you can do this easily with these ball boggers yeah and and a good a good dewalt uh cordless drill you know a 20 volt drill it will it will make a couple hundred holes even even on one of those small batteries so it's a really effective way to do this yeah we use power planter they're made in america yeah power that's what we have and i'll tell you what it's the fastest easiest way to plant bulbs or you know annuals or whatever yeah this is just beautiful huh danielle what do you think isn't that fantastic and these are fritillaria melliagris they're a little checkered bulb they're they're a small cousin of fritillaria imperialis which the crown imperial which has really tall flowers yeah okay we should start planting shall we all right [Music] we'll just set it so that so that it's just on the edge of the uh of the uh the white line [Music] okay go ahead go ahead and open up your gate there or it is open never mind [Music] probably a little deeper [Music] is is the is the belt working okay we want to have somewhere around 12 or 15 bulbs per foot of travel okay [Music] [Music] that's good it could probably be just even slightly shallower maybe just a little bit so [Music] okay can we put some pressure down put some weight on the back tires with your top link yep well this works by this vertical disc slices the turf and then there's basically a plow shoe with wings that go off to either side and that lifts the turf up and then underneath underneath where this turf is rolling along the bulbs are dropping through this chute right here you can't you can't literally see the bulbs drop because of that chute but you can see them dropping from the top and then the wheels at the back [Music] press everything back down and that's how it works i take it up even a little bit more we're going to go over some of the basics involved with augering or that is drilling holes and planting bulbs in a more conventional way so this morning we did mass planting peeled the soil back threw down bulbs and backfilled over the top of it and many of us would get down on our hands and knees and using a little shovel a little trowel or a little digging knife and plant many bulbs too that's fine but when we still have several hundred more bulbs to plant we're going to keep going in a little mass production style and that's where these power augers come into play now if you notice lee and i are using nothing more than basic cordless drills i happen to be using a dewalt it's one i've used for years but any good cordless drill is going to be able to do this job now cordless drills have a few things that make them in common they often have different speeds we're going to operate on a low speed that gives high torque or high power and not a lot of speed but that's what we need high power and a lot of control there's also a forward and reverse button so if you keep drilling for a while and you're not making a hole chances are you may be working in reverse and then lastly there's a clutch and generally that's a numerical collar around the drills and what you want to find is an icon of a drill or a straight line or an arrow and that indicates it's deactivating the clutch and giving direct drive that means all the power and torque is going to the auger now we're using an auger from the power planting company uh power planter company it's a very good strong shaft that mounts soundly into our drills it has a good spiral on that you're going to get several months of bold planting um durability out of that and a slight point just to keep us accurate in the hole that's the that's the gist of the equipment itself and now into technique lee and i were just talking about the fact that we've used tools like this in the past and sometimes though when you're drilling you may hit a rock or a root and that's not unusual so you have to be ready for that drill to bind and it'll take your arm and take your wrist and maybe even take your shoulder with it so one of the techniques i like to do and least going to demonstrate with me is we really we square up on the drill we have our hand on the trigger as necessary but i like to put a second hand on the body of the drill and we really just physically put it in contact with our legs and then descend into the hole see that's what happens but lee was ready he was squared up so when it broke loose he was ready to to deal with that and so one of the things i like to do is if you get bound up if you can pull it free that's great otherwise you switch into reverse and then back yourself out of the hole but as we're drilling holes squared up soundly holding on to it and ready for it to twist use my i use my knees rather than my lower back i descended the hole that way and see i bound up but i was ready to absorb that we back out and we try again it's nice when you hit a soft spot soft spots are great we love soft spots but what we're hitting are tree roots rocks and other underground obstacles that we're not aware of and obviously if you have water lines or electric lines you want to make sure to mark those or at least be very aware of where they are too so lee we've got some bulbs to plant here go let's dig some holes [Music] all right so we're just going to put a little bit of bold fertilizer in the base of each hole that's important because the middle nutrient doesn't move through the soil so we want those in close proximity to the bulbs that's the middle nutrient the middle nutrient most bulbs will have a rating excuse me both fertilizers bold fertilizer or any kind have three numbers nitrogen potassium excuse me nitrogen phosphorus and potassium okay it's the middle number that is the one that really uh helps with flowering it's easiest way to do it the middle one is for the flower and we want bulbs for the flowers so it's important that we get that middle nutrient um this is why you have five so five is the amount compared to the other it's a proportion it's a ratio or proportion to the other ones okay but just remember that the middle number does not move in the soil that is water doesn't move it down so it needs to be in the hole that's why we put it under the bulbs out here and we have the opportunity to get it close to the bulb now since we are still working with that naturalizing mix where we have a variety of different bulbs in there we're going to take a very small handful of an assortment throw them in a few in there another mix a few in here another mix and notice that the spacing on the holes is not regular it's not in a straight line and they will vary and that variation is much more natural looking and then when they emerge it will seem natural and that's essentially what we're going to do several hundred times now to carry this on and then you cover it up and then we'll cover this up with a little bit of the nice oil that we have at hand yeah it's just a little discovery i like to do a little push so that maybe some rodents in the area squirrels rabbits or something yeah they'd like to dig those we want to push those down just a little bit to make it that much more difficult for them to get to now do you water this afterwards or what do you do you have the opportunity we have the opportunity that's a very good question we have the opportunity for example when we're finished today to set up a sprinkler i think that's the best overhead to sort of settle the soil or if there is a good impending rain in the next two to three days i wouldn't wait much longer than that that's really ideal there's nothing to substitute the rain but sometimes we need to supplement uh in this case does otherwise the bulb dry out or does it really like lock it in the soil again again that's a very fair question the rain has much more to do with the soil stability packing that soil around those holes settling the grade the ground itself the soil around it will keep moisture in the bulb and that will prevent it from drying out but keep in mind right now in october and november before the ground gets cold and freezes this is when these little bulbs are actually putting their roots out now okay and if there is moisture in the soil it will just help those roots penetrate and get engaged [Music] and that's that's an ideal situation and then what happens when it gets winter because it gets really really cold the ground may freeze up to a couple inches which is absolutely fine these bulbs are active these bulbs will freeze simply their metabolism stops okay their root production stops and they freeze and that is ideal because they are frozen into the ground those pesky squirrels and rabbits that we talked about cannot dig in there they are frozen and locked in there and they need that cold dormancy that's one of the challenges we in the northern tier or even to the mid-atlantic enjoy bulbs but as you go south they don't have the cold dormancy and they don't really do bulbs very well because they're not cold enough in the winter so we may complain a little bit but we get bulbs in the springtime and they don't so water yes water is very important for soil stability and establishment root development and then again in the spring simply so they can emerge because you know from that tiny bulb a large plant emerges and there has to be some water to make that happen as well and every year returns since we have since we have a nice crawl section of different bulbs in here there's a high probability that every one of these cultivars these selections are going to return now keep in mind the list that we chose is based on that perennial nature that returning nature okay there may be a soil chemistry issue or a weather issue that may preclude one bulb from succeeding but we still have 10 more that are going to that are going to succeed so we're really increasing our chances by this assortment and then those that do succeed will set seed and increase constantly so this isn't a display for one year this is not a display for one decade this is for multiple decades you know they say you know plant a tree and generations beyond will enjoy it well naturalizing bulbs it's really pretty similar too that's incredible there's a lot there's a big story in these little bulbs there really is okay so this is the area that we basically created the bulb coffin that's what i'm calling it it's under the oak we removed all of this sod because it actually had to be graded anyway it was annoying saunder from the for the fact that it was just had all these pits and mounds it was really hard to mow it was getting wet in certain areas and so we basically trucked in some uh organic compost and topsoil mix and we used the sod to build up another area that we could do a garden bed so the sod did not go to waste and yeah we put in the majority of bulbs here you can see there's actually some in the distance so some of them didn't get covered by the sod so we're going to have to go in there and maybe bulb auger them in and then we actually had the tractor come in and put the bulbs in this lawn but you could see the lawn got all beat up so we're going to take some of that topsoil compost and try to even it out ourselves with just like a a little wheelbarrow so nothing too high tech but one of the places that we couldn't actually put the bulbs that we were planning on putting the bulbs is this slopey area right here and maybe you can't tell that it slopes down but it slopes down into the large pond over here and basically luke and bill who came with the tractor to do the bulb planting with the tractor didn't want to tip the tractor doesn't do so well on slopes it only does pretty well on on on a flat terrain basically so this was not bulbed up so we're just going to have straight up old lawn right here but you'll see in the distance that we were able to get maybe a little less than a quarter acre with bulbs but still it'll just we'll just have more bulbs in one area than uh than we were planning which is fine because it usually takes a while for the bulbs to have any sort of density but we'll have to be patient and see what they look like in the spring if you haven't heard yet we'll be donating and investing 10 percent of our youtube adsense revenue from this channel back into the finger lakes community we're so thankful that espoma our partners across both plant one on me and flock finger lakes channels will be matching those funds this year as well as through a combination of monies and or products depending on the project so just know that by watching these videos you're helping the community here [Music] you

Channel: Flock Finger Lakes

Views: 165,708

Keywords: Flock, Flock Finger Lakes, Finger Lakes New York, find your homestead, communal living, upstate New York, summer rayne oakes, market garden, gardening, outdoor gardening, gardening Zone 5, planting bulbs, stinzen lawn, stinzen-style garden, bulbs in lawn, crocus, galanthus, eranthis, chionodoxa, muscari, planting bulbs in lawn, how to plant bulbs, planting spring bulbs, planting fall bulbs, best bulbs for naturalizing, naturalizing bulbs, bulb lawn, flower bulbs, bulb fertilizer

Id: 3BGdleor8Hc

Length: 34min 12sec (2052 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 09 2021