Planting My New Daffodil Beds

My rush to plant daffodils is because we closed on our new home at the end of September 1999, and I had to beat the frost by getting my bulbs into the ground before the winter freeze. By the time we got moved into the new home it was the middle of October, and no prepared daffodil beds. Most years, I have a large number of bulbs to plant, but usually, only about half or a third of this year's total. Planting my entire 900 or so varieties of daffodils in hastily prepared beds was my only option.

When this article is published, I'll be deep into my planting of of the new daffodil beds.

This picture is of my planting aid after the row of seven has been planted. As you can see, the metal labels are at the marker on the planting aid, at six inch intervals in a row of seven, with only six markers as the last one had two bulbs. The two bulbs only need one marker for both.

I talked about how I prepared the beds in my last two articles. My beds are prepared now, but are not what I would have like under ideal conditions. I like double-dug daffodil beds down to 18" to 24" deep. I settled for a 24" deep chisel plow, because of lack of time, and when that didn't work, I used a backhoe to redo the work that I didn't have time to do.

We plowed the ground until it was reasonably dug, and added in sand, peat and my usual daffodil bed cocktail mix of ingredients and dug it again with the chisel plow. The last time, I dug it with a small backhoe and finished the leveling with a roto-tiller. I re-dug with the backhoe as I was not at all happy with the bed preparation, and have hopes to have time in future years to better prepare each bed as I dig it to thin the daffodils.

The Where to Plant Daffodils was a moot point. I had to plant them as best I could in the beds that were prepared as in the small time that I had.

The first step was to form the beds into controllable rows, about 4 feet across by 45 feet long. Four feet across allows me to plant 7 daffodil bulb in a small row, six inches apart. I usually plant 7 bulbs of my "old reliable" show bulbs, and fill out the beds with the ones in which I have a lesser amount.

Go To Page: 1 2 3