Planting Sphaerocephalon bulbs

A display of Sphaerocephalon bulbs at Hampton Court flower show in June, covered in bees, which is always a good thing in my book

There are times when one wants to be gardening, and there are times when one does not.  This time of year definitely falls under the second bracket, I spend the entire winter period on a constant quest for warmth and am generally to be found in at least three layers, indoors.  However, one cannot expect a lovely display come the Spring from bulbs unless one braves the cold bleakness, wraps up warm and digs in, literally.  I try and keep in mind what I am hoping to achieve and it can be basically summed up by this picture of Sphaerocephalon bulbs at Hampton Court earlier this year.  A mass of raspberry coloured balls of joy smothered in bees, but they aren't just going to pop out of the ground of their own accord.

Ideally as Sphaerocephalons are part of the Allium family, I think they want to be planted from late September to October time, but due to excessive weekend rainfall I didn't get mine in until a week or two ago.

I was also delayed by the need to buy grit.  Despite already having Alliums happily growing in the garden, a little research informed me that they like 'well drained soil' which is categorically not something I have.  Up to this point when a plant has required a little extra drainage I have mixed in some sand from an old bag that was bought for my sandpit many many moons ago, but the Alliums i felt needed the proper stuff.  I had no idea how difficult it would be to find horticultural grit, I thought it was pretty common stuff, Monty Don certainly throws the stuff about enough to give that impression.  Only after searching through several garden centres did I finally find some, which came in like eight different grades of size, which is faintly ridiculous but there we go.

So picture the scene, Im standing in the pouring rain deciding between sand, grit, fine grit, light gravel etc, finally make my choice, go to grab a bag, and what do you know; the ink on the bag is only water soluble.  Hands were green, like Shrek.  I had to be allowed into the staff area to access the sink, and even then they were tinged.  Isn't that a stupid bit of packaging?

My horticultural sand, I would have dug out some but it has been terribly wet and I don't want to be green

Anyway I digress.  So the weathers held for five minutes, bag of grits to hand, its time to get the Sphaerocephalon in.  If you read my post on what I bought at Hampton Court you will know that my bulbs came ready planted, in full bloom in fact, in a small plastic pot.  Once home I didn't really know what to do with them.  I didn't want to plant them as they were all clumped together but didn't feel I could separate them out while in flower.  So in the pot they stayed until now.  The balls of flower are long gone but I left the seed heads on, even though you are meant to remove them from Alliums to help them flower, which seems to have caused an interesting situation.

I had about five flowers, so I expected when I emptied the pot out to find five fairly smallish bulbs amongst the soil, but I didn't.  Instead there were dozens of tiny little bulbs, mainly near the top of the pot, some small, some larger but no five looking particularly well developed.  Somebody had been reseeding behind my back, although I don't know if all these new bulbs are from this year or last year, and what to do with them now.  The very smallest, maybe twenty five tiny bulbs, I decided were far too small for the garden so I potted them back up into small terracotta pots in a compost and grit mix and we will see what they do next year.  The remaining largest seven or eight bulbs, still only the size of a small road bean, I buried in the garden.

The rule of thumb with Alliums seems to be to plant them at a depth two and a half times the size of the bulb, but for a Sphaerocephalon thats not terribly deep.  So instead I winged it, dug maybe three inches down chucked a soil grit mix in the bottom, inserted the tiny bulb and filled up the holes.  If you read about this variety on the internet websites always say 'look great in drifts with long grass'.  Well I don't really have drifting room, so a space was created for an Alium patch in a sunny spot between two bushes and that will have to do.

Doesn't look like much now, just two sodden pots, but hopefully the bulbs in these will mature 

Did I mention these sink?  Oh my god onions!  I know they theoretically are part of the onion family, but where as other Allium bulbs just have the appearance of onions, these have the smell, possibly because they were damp and in soil.  It was almost too much, the hands, no longer green, did not now smell too fresh.  The smell was clearly so overwhelming I actually forgot to take a picture of the bulbs and they are planted now so your going to have to use your imagination.

Hard work done, if you can call digging a tiny hole for one of these bulbs hard work and it was back off indoors for a cup of tea and a warm up, for five minutes until I was back out planting all my other bulbs, more on which will be coming soon.  Now we just have to sit back and wait for Spring and Summer, a depressing thought.