Daffodil Gardening 101 continued
First, there are no guarantees that bulbs will survive the digging, regardless of the method used, 1) dry and store, or 2) divide and immediately replant. Second, after digging, and cleaning, proper care will give the bulbs the best survival rates. Expertise built up from education, shared experiences, and lessons learned from personal successes and failures can save the agony of losing daffodil bulbs to basal rot over the summer months. I know, I've lost my share of bulbs.
DIGGING
Gardens Daffodil bulbs need to be dug and thinned to maintain them at a high level of performance. Garden daffodils need to be dug and thinned from every 4 to 6 years, depending on how proliferic the variety is at producing new bulbs. Bulbs start competing with themselves for nutrients, water, and space, and may not bloom. Sometimes, these overcrowded blooms can be "brought back" by fertilizer, and additional watering. However, the only thing you are doing is "buying" time, because the real solution is the thinning, not the forceing them to bloom again.
Show Daffodils In the regiment of growing show quality daffodils, dig daffodil bulbs on a two year rotation for thinning and inspection. When I asked why to a large number of successful growers, the reply was, "because the successful showers dig every two years." When I asked why a two year rotation, the reply was, "it saves on the labor to dig half each year."
When one grows 500 to 900 varieties of daffodils, and puts down seven bulbs each, digging all the bulbs in one year can be very labor intensive. The answer is to divide the task, and dig half each year so that each year's job will be less than the whole. The down side is that you will be doing the "hard labor" of digging each year. If the digging was the only thing that had to be done, the job would be a laugh.
However, digging has to start off with the preparation of bags to hold the bulbs, and the making of labels so that each bag of bulbs will be properly labeled for identification. Of course, after the digging comes the cleaning, fungicide, cleaning, storage, inspection and cleaning, and possibly cleaning again. I'll explain the numerous cleanings as I proceed. It all adds up to a lot of work over a two or three month period.
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