Also, if you're like me and have no free bed space until you create it, amend the soil before the plants arrive! Or build the new raised beds.

And create sufficient drainage, like a trench leading downslope, if you dig down below grade in poorly-draining soil.

Great tip Booker. I sometimes remember to do this.

I Have a whole box of them to label! I am going to spray them first with a nice color as I don't like the metal look. Someday.

At first I thought you were going to spray the bulbs. I am easily confused it seems.

Oh, maybe I should!

I order the colored labels from Eon, on the coop at Cubits. The daylilies and hostas have green labels, iris get purple, daffodils yellow, lilium get orange, roses are pink, shrubs are brown, and peonies have dark green.

Yellow daffs, red for tulips, blue for hyacinth. What do you think Sue?
I better get busy making markers, I haven't even finished the markers for plants I got in Sept, they still have their plastic tags. : (

For the bulb ID challenged, color coded bulbs for instant recognition!

I got to thinking about it Sue, once we plant them we can't see the color, so a big waste of time. IMHO. I'll get busy making markers. I love my EON markers.

Sigh, you're right, the vision of a bowl of colorful bulbs was fun, just not practical.

I love those Eon markers, too! I had planned to use a picture with several different types of markers, but I think I got rid of all the cheap plastic ones after I got hooked on the Eon ones. I bought a whole boxful through a co-op, and am finally down to my last 50 or so.

Love the idea of the color-coded labels, but not enough to go replace all the ones I have made.

I just have two colors. The regular grayish color and a yellow one. The gray ones are for all my semps, other plants are in the yellow.
You can see there are still some old white plastic markers, those are the original makers and I just left them for the time being.

Wow, those are some very cool plants! I don't have any semps at all. I keep intending to branch out and venture into some new types of plants, but then fall hits, and I panic at the thought of winter, and plant a ton more spring bulbs and iris rhizomes. I can't tell you the horror I felt when I first read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and they said that the White Witch made it be always winter, but never Christmas. I live for spring!

Angie, you can get a can of that Rustoleum spray in any color and change the look of the ones you have left.

Here are a couple I experimented with, one a flat lime green color and the other a hammered copper look.

Sue your calligraphy is beautiful. I had to start using the labeling machine, otherwise I couldn't read my own writing. Those are great examples of plant markers. Love that hammered copper one and the lime green is so soothing to look at.

Angie come join us over in the Sempervivum Forum. In the spring there will be a ton of trading going on. If you don't have semps you can use other plants you have to trade for semps.
They would love your weather, with winter snow cover.

I didn't like the thick pen though and found fine point garden ones since then but I plan to print names on clear labels on my laser printer when I finally get everything painted.

I didn't have very good luck with the garden pens remaining clear. They started to fade with time.

Lynn, I love the look of the well-labelled plants.

They remind me of this guy:

Thank you Rick. I love looking at them all identified like that. I got a little obsessive about it and tried having them in perfect rows, but some of the semps grew faster than others and made larger clumps. Now I know how a mother hen feels.