Sue, are your fingers down to nubs after all those bulbs you had to plant? No, but the side of my left hand and one finger looks pretty bad. I am planting all these in the front yard woods, which means clearing off fallen limbs and the stick and leaf debris before stringing out the rows. I was also trimming up little trees so as to not get poked in an eye, (or ear like happened earlier this year) by little low hanging limbs. The pruning saw slipped and caught my left hand. I bled like a stuck hog, but kept at it. (The bleeding didn't last long) I'll not be using the saw any more without wearing some good gloves. Who would have guessed that planting a lot of bulbs in a wooded setting would be such a chore? Not me, or I would not have procrastinated so long. In some areas I have had to clear out vines on the ground. Honeysuckle, Virginia Creeper, Poison Ivy? YIKES! I 'can' say though that the soil looks really good compared to the more clay like soil in the yard, veggie garden, and flower beds. Oh, my favorite is a Peanut Buster Parfait with EXTRA Hot Fudge. Yum! Sue

Well, my patience finally paid off. I stopped by Sam's today, and they had their fall bulbs marked down to $7.01 with plenty left to choose from. They still have daffodils, tulips, hyacinths, irises, anemone, allium, etc. I opted for a box of 45 Hyacinths, 15 each of: Jan Bos, Delft Blue, and Carnegie and one box of 15 Jan Bos Hyacinths and 40 Jetfire Daffodils. Let me know if you find anything you can't live without!

Yes, the earlier posters are right. The alliums you can find on Brent & Becky's are fall-planted bulbs, so won't come until the correct time for you to plant them in the fall. Definitely worth the wait, however. I have grown a variety of tall alliums for years, and wouldn't be without them. My varieties bloom over about 6 weeks in purples and whites, and after the flowers have faded, I leave the seed heads until the fade, usually another several weeks. The critters that like to eat bulbs leave these alone, and they aren't fussy and get no additional care. Like daffodils, they will slowly reproduce through offsets, so the clumps get bigger and bigger, but I have yet to have any that seemed to need dividing. One of my earliest clumps is in a garden that I'm dismantling, and I'll probably have at least a dozen, probably more to replant from my original 3. More than once I have had folks driving by on the road stop to ask me what they are and where to get them.

Many years ago I read a rather prejudicial statement by a gardening non-american who said that American Gardeners were like babies. If it wasn't big bright and shiny we couldn't appreciate it. Well, I disagree-WAH! The point is that some of the seed heads of Alliums are also attractive in their own right (as Cameron mentioned about Purple Sensation) if you have an eye for such things. For instance I've used the Drumstick Allium heads in dried arrangements with success. Also at a teaching garden I was attracted to a group of medium growing large flower heads that looked like an explosion of fireworks had just gone off. It turned out they were the seed heads of Allium Schubertii. They were planted in front of an evergreen shrub border with competition from nothing else "bright and shiny" to distract, and their unusual form took center stage. The guide said that they stayed like that for at least a month or so. I've never seen them in bloom, but had I a similar set up, I'd certainly try the same combination. Here is a link that might be useful: Allium Schubertii