Planting a bulb lasagne

Autumn is the perfect time to plant spring flowering bulbs.  Here’s a fun way to do it from the new book A Year of Nature Craft and Play by Catherine Hughes & Becky Goddard-Hill.  Designed to inspire kids to get creative with nature, it’s filled with 52 gardening projects, crafts, games, art activities and science experiments to keep them busy all year!

A bulb lasagne is a cool way of layering different types of spring bulbs in a pot.  The top layer of bulbs flowers first, followed by the next layer, and so on, giving you a long-lasting display of flowers from just one container.  You don’t even need a garden to do it!

 

Planting a bulb lasagne instructions:

1. 1. Use a trowel to put compost in your pot, until it’s roughly one third full.
   2. Place the bulbs that flower latest (check the packet for details) on top of the compost with their pointy ends facing up. Try to space them out evenly.
   3. Add more compost to your pot so that the bulbs are covered up, then plant the bulbs that flower before the bottom layer on top of this.
   4. Keep going with layers of compost and bulbs until you’ve planted all your bulb varieties. The bulbs that flower soonest should be on your top layer.
   5. Finish by covering your top layer of bulbs with compost, and water your pot.
   6. If you’d like to make your pot look lovely straight away, you can plant some winter bedding plants (such as pansies, violas, cyclamen and heather) on the top. When the bulbs start to grow they will find their way through – you don’t need to remove the plants.

   Click here to buy a copy of the new book A Year of Nature Craft and Play by Catherine Hughes & Becky Goddard-Hill.