I felt halfway over my cold today, when the weather was supposed to be the highest in a while, 42 F, and even kind of sunny. After a few non-postponable family commitments, I put on a scarf, hat, and down coat and headed out at 2 pm to make tracks before the sun went down at four. Dashing back and forth between the garage and the back yard assembling tools and my huge tray of bulbs, I chortled, "It doesnÂt even FEEL cold!" I decided to start with the little bulbs like chionodoxa that needed shallow 3 inch holes, thinking once I got those done I would feel a great sense of accomplishment. Then I started digging my first little hole. I thought, "WhatÂs that yucky white mold under the mulch?" and plunged my trowel in. Or not. (Did I hit a rock? Move trowel over, try againÂ) Nothing happened. The trowel did not go in even an inch. ThatÂs when I realized the funny looking white stuff was not mold, but ICE CRYSTALS. The ground was already frozen! In mid-November! IÂve planted later than this before! How can this be??? I got a pickaxe and managed to plant maybe 50 before the sun was too far down to continue. That is, if you can call it "planting" when you put a chunk of frozen dirt on top of a bulb and canÂt press it down knowing that if you do, you will crush the bulb. 3 inch deep hole, hah. Those chionodoxa are an inch down if anything. 50 down, 650 to goÂ.ItÂs supposed to snow tomorrow.

Sorry to hear about your dilemna... I don't think you can keep the bulbs for the next season so I would try to avoid this option. Some ideas: 1) Consider donating them to a charitable organization. May be at least you could get a charity deduction? 2) If giving them away is an option, consider contacting your local garden club and see if they could use them for town beautification projects. You could also contact daycares or nursery schools as they may be interested in them for projects and these are often underfunded. 3) Give to family and friends. May be they have beds that the bulbs could go in without work? May be some could help you plant in your yard for free bulbs? 4) Save some to force inside. If you have an unheated garage or cellar (like a bulkhead), you could chill them appropriately then force them inside. You can water force or put in soil. You can chill in the refridgerator also if no fruit is stored there. I have an extra fridge that I wrap the bulbs in cut up brown paper bags. I label the paper bags with the date put in the fridge and variety. Then you can take out and force them later at the appropriate time based on the variety. I just read in the Boston Globe by Carol Stocker also mentions that you can put the bulbs in pots and put them outside and cover with a heavy layer of bark mulch. If you put the pots outside directly exposed the bulbs will freeze and die. Here is a link that might be useful: Carol Stocker Article (free registration req'd)

Now I really have a problem. The seed company has finally mailed my tuberoses to my daughter's house in Austin. I had resigned myself to giving her a shipment of glads since I bought a package in Jan. plus have located sellers at the local Tuesday Market. However the tuberoses I have found locally have no scent. I am not going to be in Austin untiL late August and I really would love to have these........ There really isn't a cool place in Austin to hang bulbs in untill August. I won't do this again since they mail so late even based on Texas planting times.

I know that I'm near the northern edge of where garlic will reliably winter over, so I get my initial heads from a reliable northern source, like Johnny's or a local farmer. Someplace like an organic supermarket may get theirs from a warmer climate (much garlic comes from CA), so probably won't be hardy for me. Hardiness might also be the problem with pm2's barrel planting - too much exposure to cold without the insulation of surrounding soil. I find garlic one of my easiest crops. I plant late October (last weekend this year) though I have planted successfully as late as immediately post-Thanksgiving one year when I brought back Wisconsin garlic from a family holiday visit. As CTlady mentioned, you want the roots to grow, but not the top before winter so that the top is ready to grow immediately come spring, but energy hasn't been wasted growing greens that immediately die in the fall. Plant the biggest cloves to get the biggest bulbs. If the tops grow and die in the fall, the bulbs will still grow in the spring, just maybe not quite as big. 6"x6" is also how I grow mine, and I've used compost, chopped leaves, and wood shavings as mulch various years. I usually put down about 6" of mulch over the whole bed (typically about 4'x12' - we use garlic in quantity in everything but desserts) and although advice is to remove most of the mlch come spring, I never do and have had no problems. I usually label and keep track of varieties as I harvest so I can replant next year's crop from this year's largest cloves. This year due to health problems I wasn't able to do that - it was all I could do to get to the garden and pull the bulbs with a knee injury- but I found this fall that I could tell the kinds of garlic apart just from the appearance. So I don't know which of the names of my 5 or 6 varieties go with which rows of plants, but since they look distinctly different based on how the cloves grow in the head and the color of the skin on the cloves I could plant them separately. One thing that has made my planting easier is that my husband, who is a bit of an inventor and quite handy, made a garlic/onion planter. It's a narrow 4' board (the width of our veggie garden beds) with pointed 3" pegs an inch in diameter spaced every 6 inches. I turn and rake smooth the beds and then I press it along the side of the bed to space my rows, and then across the bed to create holes to drop the cloves into and then water thoroughly to let the soil sift down around the cloves - no digging and filling needed for individual cloves. I indent every other row 3" so that there is an evenly spaced grid.