-  Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the 2018 Garden Expo. My name is Ben Futa and I'm the director of the Allen Centennial Garden here at UW-Madison. For those who aren't familiar with the garden, just a quick but a shameless self-promotion. We are on the UW-Madison campus. We are always free and always open, so you can visit any time. And today I'm excited to be able to talk about this idea of bulb lawns because it's something we've been experimenting with a lot in the Allen Centennial Garden, and other gardens are beginning to do it as well. And this is a concept of, as the title describes, adding a new dimension to your landscape. We're going to sort of start with a primer, basically, and explore what you really should be thinking about as a gardener and as a homeowner before really looking at how to design a bulb lawn. But first actually answering the question of what is a bulb lawn. The good news is it's a pretty self-explanatory term, basically planting flowering bulbs in your lawn. Now, there's a lot of different dimensions and aspects of that, which obviously we're going to jump into here. You can see from this image that it can be something just as very simple as a few daffodils, which is probably is something most of us are familiar with, of seeing daffodils coming up through a turf scenario. But there's a few things to consider if a bulb lawn is something you want to develop yourself. And these are sort these four considerations to really think about. The first is mowing. Based on the type of bulb lawn you install will also dictate when you should begin mowing, and this is critical because bulbs of course need to regenerate energy to bloom the next season. So as long as their leaves are green, they're gathering energy and they're storing that energy to produce the next year. And if we begin mowing too soon or if we cut off those green leaves, essentially what we're doing is starving the plant of nutrients, and over time they'll either stop blooming altogether and they'll suffer and eventually disappear. And if we're going to invest a lot of time, energy, and money into building a bulb lawn, then we should make sure that it's, it's an investment. The good news is once it's in, it's done, but also we, again, don't want to shoot ourselves in the foot. So consider when you're comfortable starting mowing. And we'll talk more about that in greater depth. Also think about your neighbors. I say this only because a bulb lawn is not terribly conventional. I am all for pushing the envelop and letting your freak flag fly and doing you in the garden, and I support all of you doing that. I want you all to be creative and think of yourselves as artists. I like to say that gardening is the slowest of the performing arts. So whether you realize it or not--  [laughter]  Whether you realize it or not, each of you is a choreographer, you're a stage manager, you are setting a stage, you're creating a performance of moments when things happen and recede and come on and come off. So you all are artists. But also your neighbors may not quite understand what you're doing right away. So thinking about how you design your bulb lawn but also how you communicate with those around you is critical so that you can enjoy it and others can enjoy it at the same time. Obviously budget. Plants cost money. But, as we look into this again, different types of bulbs are sort of scaled differently in terms of budget and expense, and we'll look at that. And then also, actually, the scale. Are you working on the space sort of the size of this stage, or are you trying to fill an acre with bulbs? If you're doing an acre, I really applaud you, but you're going to need a lot of help to get it installed. These are labor-intensive to install the first time, but, again, the good news is it's a one and done deal. Once it's in, you don't have to go back and replant it every year. It's like a fine wine. It gets better with age. So all of that being said, we're going to look at a few of the tools that I found to be some of the most successful in doing t