I got to get my boots dirty this weekend after a long summer of no gardening. We’re not going to be able to get any gardens up and ready this fall at the new house so I planted next year’s garlic out at the farm.

I had picked up two new varieties of garlic at the Toronto Garlic Festival, Hungarian and Leningrad (the later is an heirloom variety), and got more Music to plant in addition to what I had grown this year. Add these to the Siberian, Purple Glazer and Korean Purple I grew from last year and I managed to plant almost 300 cloves of garlic! I’ll be sharing this harvest with my Mom and my brother, who also just moved and wont have his own new garden up and running in time to plant this fall.

The other conundrum I had was what to do with the 500 tulip bulbs I dug up from the old house. Yeah that’s right. 500. Totally nutso, I know. Plus another 50 hyacinth bulbs and a few daffodils.

The grounds around the new house needs time to settle after all the waterproofing and other digging we did, so we really wont be doing any serious landscaping until next spring. This means I had to figure out what to do with all those tulips.

So now my Mom has two beds that should be riot of colour next spring. Apparently she already has orders for bouquets of tulips next spring. This will give me another opportunity to mark them for colour and more properly sort them out. My Mom had a brilliant idea when I was trying to think of how to mark them with something that will hold up to sun and weather while we wait for the bulbs to finish off and be ready to dig up; and she suggested yarn. How perfect and appropriate is that? Yay!

That’s Harvey by the way, my Mom’s dog. He helped. It felt so good to be puttering around in the dirt. Thanks to my Mom for doing all the prep work and tilling the soil to make it so nice to work in!