Bonemeal and Bulbs, good idea or bad?

It all started with TPoSDT visited, they spoke of a structures as tall as 11 Red London Buses piled on top of each other! Biomes built into a sixty foot crater, it sounds and is, other worldly. Actually, it's anti-everything I have observed in the human units. Words like ecology and conservation flow from the crater in abundance, they are even researching "Green" surfboards!. The place is the Eden Project, so given the urgings of "TMO" I visited with SWWMD. Unfortunately we visited in the spring, at a time called Bulb Mania. When the air must be imbued with some form of mind altering narcotic gas, or perhaps it was the bubonic plague, argued to be the real origin of TulipMania. We ordered hundreds of the things. I must explain that I saw it as an investment! After all there was a time not too long ago in the history of this greeny blue planet (1637) that bulbs were sold by weight, and one weighing about half an ounce could be sold to purchase: eight pigs, four oxen, twelve sheep, twenty-four tons of wheat, forty-eight tons of rye, two hogsheads of wine, four barrels of beer, two tons of butter, a thousand pounds of cheese, a silver drinking cup (as well as clothes, bed and mattress, and a ship! ((Now, you don't think me so stupid eh!!))

As usual the above may or may not bare any resemblance to that thing called reality, which one human unit recently described as "just a crutch for people who can't deal with drugs" but I digress. As hinted at earlier, some see the whole TulipMania thing as an artefact of a mass histeria caused by the bubonic plague.

Well months later, after having visited BulbMania, just as promised, the said bulbs arrived in a distressingly large box. (Goodness knows how many hogsheads of wine they would have cost in 1637!) Needless to say we practised a few weekends of bulb procrastination. However I did do my research, on how to make the bulbs grow in weight during their planting, for after all this is how one makes money, every aas counts! (0.0018gm).

It seems the answer lies in allowing rapid root development, which in turn lies in the right feed: which according to the web is Phosphorous, which can be found in Bonemeal. Bone meal helps develop sturdy root systems and stimulates plant growth. As luck would have it the previous gardening season, I had purchased enough bone meal to plant thousands of bulbs.... Serendipity is such a wonderfull thing, as well as being a great spaceship, if you take out the "dip".

Just imagine the hogsheads of wine I will be able to buy now I have found this money spinning trick!

The saturday was sunny and both SWWMD and I focussed on the massive undertaking, OH Yes! did I mention that SGM had also chosen to add to the fun by buying us an additional 60 bulbs. Pits were dug and appropriately sprinkled with copious amounts bonemeal, pots were filled, again with generous dollops of the ground stuff! I was positively salivating at the thought of the resulting "aas".

Anyone spotted the flaw yet?

Many will have! And no it wasn't the downright disingenuity of the internet, for while researching for this blog, I came acrooss this link The best time to feed bulbs? When you plant them! You may think "and???" that's what you have been telling us. However, embedded deep within the reinforcing article, is this question: What about bonemeal, the old favorite? The answer a very disappointing:

Because changes in commercial processing have affected the nutrient quality of bonemeal, it's no longer the best fertilizer to use when planting bulbs.

That just served to rub my nose in it! Which unfortunately is part of the root of the real problem. For a certain TMTDUB has a nose that is very good at determining where he planted his bones, well most of the time, as he knows he has lost a few!

IMAGINE!, the next morning that he prances out into the garden anticipating the blessed relief that emptying a canine bowel can bring, when POW!!! his olfactory nerves start firing 10 to the dozen a garden FULL of BONES! Yippee.... where to begin!

Hence his DMLA, The Mutt That Digs Up Bulbs!

His disappointment is only matched by that of the merchant who lost his Semper Augustus to the sailor to whom he had just rewarded a red herring breakfast, who thought it was an onion and nicked it to eat with his free breakfast.

Now we have the fun game of reburying hundreds partly chewed bulbs.