Last gasp for East Texas daffodil blooms

Last Thursday I attended an all day conference on plants. The early morning speaker shared good information on Southern Heirloom Bulbs and the first photo is of him holding a “Wine and Roses” Crinum bulb.

While he was telling folks that locally the “heirloom” daffodils suffered tremendously from the heat and drought of last summer and that daffodils had been done blooming for about a month and it was now time to “dig and divide”….I was busy at the back of the room throwing together a pitiful display of about 50 different varieties that I had just pulled out of my waist deep weedy “green mulch” fields just an hour before:-))

Here in the south we still have quite a few varieties still in bud but I will begin harvesting n. Jonquilla seeds this weekend as the early blooming varieties split their seed pods this week and are going to dump seeds with the next high winds or rains.

With the mild winter and mild spring we had a HUGE invasion of moths. There were literally hundreds of moths at any given drift of daffodils at dusk, on into the late warm nights while they were in full bloom. They worked down through our property depending on the direction of the wind. They seemed drawn by the scent of tazettas and jonquils but they stopped at every color of daffodil across the fields.

There are all sorts of pollinators in the daffodils. One I had not noticed before in such high numbers was a tee tiny beetle working all of the n. Jonquilla. On fresh jonquilla blooms there were two or more small beetles not much larger than super charged thrips….They were busy crawling over the stigma and the exposed ripe pollen. Not unusual to see four to six of them on a single flower. We often have thousands of blooms open on a block of n. Jonquilla so there were lots of these beetle pollinators.

Anyway the gentleman who spoke of “all of the daffodils” being done blooming had a hard time believing that anyone could bring that many different varieties after all of our weeks of 80*F 27*C temperatures! I presented a “Daffodil and Cavity Nesting Bird species program” at the end of the day. There were 47 folks there, with most of them staying the whole day. Keith Kridler Mt. Pleasant, Texas