additional question on daffodils and vegetable gardens

I’ve heard that daffodils can be poisonous and found this info

Daffodil (Narcissus pseudonarcissus) l. The aboveground parts cause dermatitis in sensitive individuals. The bulbs can also cause dermatitis. Humans have been poisoned after ingesting bulbs thought to be onions, as have cattle when they were fed bulbs instead of feed in times of scarcity.(Mitchell and Rook 1979, Litovitz and Fahey 1982, Cooper and Johnson 1984).

and this is from the Wikipedia post on daffodils:

All Narcissus varieties contain the alkaloid poison lycorine, mostly in the bulb but also in the leaves.[7][8

this may be far-fetched, but if the bulbs are in the same beds as vegetable plants, can the potential poison permeate thru the soil into the vegetables.

Just wondering………

Brad Weaver

2 comments for “additional question on daffodils and vegetable gardens

  1. I gave a talk to a garden club yesterday and mentioned the toxicity of daffodils and their dislike by deer. There was a recent reference to a bulb being used in error as an onion in soup, resulting in a group of sick kids who ate the soup. A few years ago there was a report in the RHS annual of an elderly gent who cooked up a mess of mistaken onions and didn’t live to tell the tale. After my talk a lady who grew up in Wales reminded me of the Welsh love of daffodils and mentioned a case she observed of someone who mistakenly ate one and lived to joke about it, “probably because it’s the national flower of Wales.”

    A web reference noted that the Welsh are also partial to leeks and that the two words are similar in that strange language. I was reminded of the “onion digger” used at Oakwood Daffodils to harvest bulbs.

    None of this answers the question, but I won’t be experimenting with Daffs near my tomatoes.

    George
    Elderly Gent

    Sent from my iPad (which just capitalized the name of my favorite flower without any help from me)

  2. Bradley, I mainly grow annual flowers
    over my daff beds, things that I don’t
    feed or water, but I have cilantro and
    parsley in a couple of the beds and the
    daffs don’t cause them any problem. I
    pull out the parsley roots that grow too
    large so they don’t crowd out the
    daffodils. One year I thought I would
    make better use of another of the daff
    beds and I planted leaf lettuces over
    it, but it was too hard to cut the
    lettuces and not get the daff foliage,
    so I don’t think that was such a good
    idea. Small head lettuces might have
    been better, but I couldn’t cut the leaf
    lettuces without getting some of the
    daff foliage and didn’t want that in my
    salad! My thought was to try to grow
    things that were not heavy feeders and
    that did not need much additional
    watering. If you experiment with this
    more, please let us know your results.

    Thanks,
    Becky Fox Matthews
    that daffy girl near Nashville


    American Daffodil Society logo
    Becky Fox Matthews
    / 1^st //Vice President/*
    American Daffodil Society, Inc.***

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