Each year, just before our Midwest Daffodil Society Sale, I check the prices of daffodils at the local big box and garden stores. This morning I was in The Home Depot and made the following notes:
The following are in bags of 10, marked at $4.98:
Barret Browning Cheerfulness Dick Wilden Dutch Master Golden Ducat
Ice Follies Ice King Junaita (?) King Alfred Pink Charm
Professor Einstein Replete Salome Tahiti Thalia
Mixed Mixed Doubles Mixed Trumpets Mixed Split Coronas
Paperwhites are 6/$5
Others are:
King Alfred 45/$15 Trumpets 42/$15
Most of these are marked with Garden Club The Home Depot. These and other bulbs are marked for the season, these all being marked “2d Season.”
There are some memories here. I think the first ribbon I won was for Ice King and I was envious of the Tahiti I saw in that show. Of course, it still shows up and competes, depending on the year. Some of those are excellent yard bubs and worthy of recommending to newbies.
What is Junaita? I figured it was a misspelled Juniata, but neither are in Daffseek.
George Dorner
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To be or not to be: that is the question, whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
In one of the Bard’s best-thought-of tragedies, our insistent hero, Hamlet, queries on two fronts about how life turns rotten.
(Cory Calhoun)
(Cory Calhoun)
I’m curious about how likely the single varieties sold are actually as advertised. I don’t show or breed daffodils, but I like to know exactly what I’m planting so I can gauge bloom time, heights, etc. and am always leery of buying from the Big Box stores, especially now that I have a smaller portion of my yard that I can devote to daffs after moving to the mountains.
I have purchased Juanita at similar stores for garden use, so agree with Mary Lou that it is the probable cultivar intended. As to Deborah’s query, my experience with accuracy of naming is mixed. Sometimes they’ll be just what they say. Sometimes a bag with a single name on it will have 5 other cultivars mixed in it. So caveat emptor.
Melissa
At 09:29 AM 9/12/2010, Mary Lou Gripshover wrote:
I tend to raid the big box clearance sale piles at the end of the season for daffodils to fill in odd corners of the yard (and it kills me to think that in another week, most of those poor things wind up in the dumpster.). Usually I get bags with the labels missing, so for me, there’s the thrill of, “Will I get something really unexpectedly amazing, or will I just get something that vaguely resembles a King Alfred? when it comes to these stores’ offerings. I’ve heard rumors that the corporate people have the bags and labels printed up in advance and then give them to the big growers who then put in their leftovers and such that vaguely resemble the picture provided – which may explain the wide variance between the picture and the actual flower.