Weather was a factor – a significant one! Ironstone Vineyards, the Show location, was near the snowline on Friday evening! Still, this didn’t deter our basic group of exhibitors – they began to arrive at Ironstone Friday in mid-afternoon. The week since the previous Show in Livermore was filled with wind, rain, hail, and even occasional snow – and this cut down the number of exhibitable cultivars the Bay Area exhibitors could bring.
Still, in Oakley, the previous week’s weather was pretty decent. So the large number of blooms Bob Spotts brought was useful. Kirby Fong was limited to about 50 blooms of excellent quality (including his Gold Ribbon winner from Livermore). We had also refrigerated many of Steve Hampson’s superb blooms from Livermore and brought them. Jon Kawaguchi returned from watching Spring baseball in Arizona and brought a significant number of lovely Miniatures. Nancy Tackett & Ben Blake, Mary Roach, Rosemary Scholz, Bert Elings, Purnima Sreenivasan, and Carol Gordon came and contributed winning entries. We entered 257 daffodil exhibits including 560 stems.
The key to a successful weekend was the continuing assistance to our members. Larry Ringland’s Ironstone crew brought up the show equipment from storage and even filled the test tubes to get us started. Kerry Keeney of Ironstone’s staff prepared the showroom and assured us fresh coffee throughout the weekend. NCDS President Jan Moyers (with her new Yorkie pup) was masterful in her management of show data. She gave us a complete summary of the show at the Saturday evening dinner! But the most outstanding contributions were by four NCDS members who continually pitched in to get us underway (eg, taking entries to the show tables), served as Clerks during judging, and helped in the show breakdown. Sincere kudos to Susan & Ron Duncan of Reno and Sherrie & David Van Vliet of Escalon CA.
As last year, there were a great number of visitors who asked questions we were delighted to answer. For example: “You say there are now 32,000 different daffodils. Bulbs divide but is that the way we got so many?” That led to a discussion of how bulb division increases the number within a cultivar, but cross-pollination is the line to getting new cultivars. Among our visitors on Saturday we hosted a busload of senior ladies from Roseville (two hours away) who were having a fine day at Ironstone!
Our Saturday dinner was at Alchemy Restaurant in Murphys and was a culinary delight.
All the winning cultivars can be viewed on Kirby Fong’s report on the 2019 Murphys Show.