My Daffodil Garden, 3rd Week in April

April is a busy month here at "Fox Run," as it is time for the normal spring gardening, and we have all out weekends tied up running to daffodil shows. So far, this year, we are into the forth week and have finished our sixth show. Our daffodils are not up to "par" this year, and we are thinking that it is a number of things, such as the hasty beds we had to plant last fall, without the beds having time to settle in. There were other things, e.g., snow storms in the middle of the blooming season.

You can see from this picture that the trees are starting to bud, and as you look down the hill from the street above toward our house, there are many things evident of spring. To the lower right is a small 'Tete-A-tete' daffodil in bloom, various irises in a beginning stage, and the purple plants in back of the sign post are peonies about a foot out of the ground and not yet turned green, but . . . remember the snow in my pictures last week.

"What a difference a week makes!!"

The pictures of my daffodil beds were taken a week after the snow storm, and one week to the date as the pictures from last week. Last week all the daffodils were on the ground, this week, we are overwhelmed with daffodils in bloom. I love it!!!

The overall bloom this year seems a little weak from last year, but after two years of drought, I'm lucky to keep the daffodils in show worthiness form. It's taken a lot of TLC.

This is 'Conestoga' a daffodil produced by the late Bill Bender from Chambersburg, PA. It is a later large cupped division 2 daffodil that is blooming this week in my garden. The type daffodils that are in the garden this week are the later divisions, such as the division three short cupped daffodils, division 5 triandrus daffodils, division 7 jonquilla daffodils, and the division 9, poeticus daffodils are getting a start. The mid-season and late season daffodils are going strong now, and I feel my garden is reaching it's "peak" bloom for the year.

This is the first year down for these daffodils, which causes the foliage not to be thick. After moving last year, late in September into October, I also refrigerated a lot of bloom, and that caused a vast amount of my flowers to be short stemmed this year. Don't know the reason, but I had been warned that planting into the winter and refrigeration may not bring good results. Lesson learned.

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