Bag of Bulbs

[Johnsfolly]

OK I'm going to come clean on one of my guilty pleasures.

I typically try to go as native as I can when it comes to flower and butterfly gardening around my house. We have columbines, milkweeds, celadine poppies, spiderworts, Jacob's ladder, wild ginger, Virginia bluebells, coneflowers, sweet Williams, New England asters, etc. all around our yard with varying degrees of success. 

However I do have a passion for day lilies and also daffodils. So this week I couldn't pass up the daffodil sales at our local ACE hardware. After I got back from another unsuccessful deer hunting trip on Sunday, I planted 120 mixed daffodil bulbs throughout the area where I keep my daffodils. With these sales, it's often hit or miss on the quality of the bulbs or the longevity of them once they are planted. I used to buy a lot from Breck's, which cost a fair amount of money. They would come up that first spring and would look great, but they tended to last only a couple of years here in our Missouri dirt. So I have been just reseeding (rebulbing) those areas every couple of years with cheaper bulbs. I still get a lot of new flowers in the spring and several have been fairly persistent in my yard thus far. The good thing is that I tend to forget just how many and often exactly where I have planted these bulbs. So when they don't all come up in the spring, I'm typically not disappointed.

Now I can't wait until spring.

[jdmidwest]

If you are going thru the trouble, why don't you till in some compost into the plot before you plant the bulbs?  They should last longer, depending on your soil type.

Daffodils are usually pretty hardy, they still come up on the hillside where the original homeplace is on the farm.  It has been abandoned for over 60 years and overgrown with trees and leaf litter.  I dug some up along with the iris that still come up there too and transplanted 20 years ago, they still bloom every year in the new spot.  The old yellow ones are hardy in our climate.  You can find them at about any old homeplace in the state.  Various colors are a little more finiky.  Your soil must be pretty weak to have issues with them.

[Johnsfolly]

At my work daffodils come up in the old field and I do grab some from that old homestead fairly often. As you stated those bulbs keep coming up year after year. I am always amazed walking in the woods and find a outline of daffodils where an old house once stood. If it weren't for those flowers you wouldn't even know that there ever was a house there. There are a couple of those places down at Parker Hollow access on the Current.

Dont get me wrong. We do get many of them every year. I also do augment the soil for most of the plantings in the worse soil areas. I have a goal to have them blanket an area of our property and they aren't spreading like I want them. 

[Johnsfolly]

Starting to see the daffodils coming up from the bulbs I planted last fall. So the ones I planted just about doubles what I had from previous years in each of these photos. The early bloomers are up (about 1/2 to 2/3 of the total) and the others are still coming up.

[ness]

C'mon spring!