Daffodils and Garden Beds
The other reason I do it is that daffodil growing and showing is not an exact science. Daffodils will often have a mind of their own when it comes to blooming. I've had seasons where my late beds bloomed in the middle of April, leaving me barren of late bloom for the remainder of the month. In those cases, it was the late late daffodil planted in the late beds that I took to the shows.
So, you ask, is there any difference between early, mid-season and late season beds other than planting the right bulbs in the bed. The answer is yes. Just planting the right bulbs is no guarantee that you will have late beds, so you have to make some adjustments to assure a better chance of success.
Building Late BedsThe best method to insure late beds, without a lot of work, is to cut down on the sunlight. At my last home, my late bed was located in a small clearing surrounded by giantic tulip popular trees that kept throwing branches at me when I worked my beds. However, the trees provided a deep shade on the beds for about half the day, each day. The beds got about four hours of direct sun, a couple hours of speckled sun, and a whole lot of deep shade. Blooming in this bed was two to three weeks behind my early bed.
Here at this new house I obviously created the same effect by planting my large daffodil bed on the reverse slop of a relatively steep hill behind a six feet privacy fence on the border of the property. The reverse slop means that the sun is on the south side with the slope going away from the sun, or going north. In the spring this reverse slope bed gets little direct sunlight as the sun is to the south and is partially blocked by the slope of the hill itself. It is later in the daffodil season, and into early summer before the sun get high enough to put continuous sunlight onto the garden bed. It took the daffodils a long time to come up, and longer to
Latest Articles