When many gardeners are winding down their efforts, Heath is looking ahead. He’s helping gardeners get ready for spring by encouraging them to plant the bulbs now that will burst into bloom once winter subsides.

Heath, co-owner of the mail-order retailer Brent and Becky’s Bulbs, will be bringing inspiration to area gardeners when he presents a container-planting workshop and lecture Sept. 17 at Cleveland Botanical Garden. Both will focus on companion planting, combining bulbs with other types of plants for a more attractive and effective display.

While plants from bulbs bloom at various times of the year, spring is when bulbs are in the spotlight. They produce the familiar flowers of early spring — flowers like hyacinths and daffodils, tulips and crocuses — as well as lesser-known types such bellevalia and eranthis.

Heath loves playing with them. He enjoys engaging in what his wife and business partner Becky jokingly calls ”orgy gardening,” collecting lots of plants and putting them into a bed together.

He might start by planting spring-flowering bulbs in the fall, plug in some perennials the next spring, perhaps sprinkle in some wildflowers in summer and the following fall pull those out and overseed with biennials such as larkspur, violas or bachelor buttons.

Spring bulbs, he’s found, go well with perennials including pansies, violas and hellebores. Summer bulbs pair well with tropical annuals. And bulbs are ideal for planting amid ground covers, he said.

Both ground covers and perennials hide the maturing leaves after the flowers have faded, and they take up water from the soil to help keep the bulbs dry while they’re dormant.

Heath’s years of experience and experimentation — he grew up on a bulb farm — have taught him lessons about bulb-growing that sometimes fly in the face of conventional wisdom.

For instance, he takes issue with the advice that you can plant sun-loving spring bulbs under trees, because the bulbs will bloom before the leaves come out. That’s true, but when those leaves do appear, they’ll rob the bulbs’ foliage of the sunlight it needs to produce and store nutrients for the next year’s growth, he said.

So if you’re planting bulbs such as daffodils that you want to come back year after year, pick a spot that stays sunny, he said. Otherwise they might peter out over time.

He also disputes the suggestion that you can tie up the bulbs’ leaves after the flowers fade. That limits their exposure to sunlight and air, which they need, he said. Once the foliage starts to yellow, you can remove it.

Heath also has an unorthodox planting method for the clay soil that’s found on his Maryland farm as well as in much of Northeast Ohio.

Instead of digging holes for the bulbs, he spreads a 6-inch layer of compost over the soil and lays the bulbs directly atop the compost. Then he covers the bulbs with an appropriate amount of mulch — three times the height of the bulb, or about 6 inches of mulch for a 2-inch bulb.

As the mulch breaks down and dissipates over the years, he just adds more. ”They grow so much better,” he said of the bulbs. To discourage pests from munching on your tulip bulbs, Heath recommends coating them with a good animal repellant and letting them dry before you plant. Adding some sharp, crushed gravel to the planting hole helps, too, and it also improves drainage.

Or follow his lead and adopt a couple of cats. His own two pets keep his bulb-munching vole population at bay, although he said he’s had to train the cats not to go after birds.

What Heath encourages gardeners to do is think about and work with their own circumstances — their yard’s soil, microclimates and other factors. But that’s all part of the fun. By Mary Beth Breckenridge, Beacon Journal