Good morning.
Here is a question I found in my mail and was asked to post to the forum.
frank
From: Rod Steele
Subject: Flowering question
Message Body:
I have a number of double blooming yellow daffs. They always come up, send up flower stalks, they set buds that have the brownish gray covering but only about a third actually bloom. Last week, full boom for some, today I felt some of the buds and they felt like air was inside, some of the buds get really fat but will not bloom some stay small and don’t bloom. What gives? Thx, Rod
Doubles blast when they get hit by cold weather. It’s normal.
Clay
You didn’t say where you live, but I think temperature changes definitely are the problem. It can look like the buds are forming nicely and are going to bloom, and then you get a temperature change. It doesn’t seem to matter if you’re going from a nice, cool spring and then it suddenly gets hot–or going from a warm spring (like we’ve had here in Ohio this year) to cold weather. The buds blast. I’ve found one double that almost always does well here, no matter the temperature changes. It’s ‘Elixir’. The multi-headed flowers like ‘Cheerfulness’ and ‘Sir Winston Churchill don’t seem to be affected.
We don’t get the freezing weather here that happens in some US locations yet we get flower blast in many of the older double cultivars. It seems inherent in them regardless of conditions. Modern cultivars seem less susceptible to blast. In our conditions I always thought that it was planting in a dry soil location that caused the problem rather than temperature.
Would it be true that ‘Cheerfulness’ and ‘ Sir Winston Churchill’ have tazetta in them and therefore will tolerate drought?
Here in Ohio many times have green on back segments and sometimes deformed segments.
Don’t buy many doubles because of this problem.
Naomi
Sent from my iPad
We have no problems with 3 of our new varieties, They will even take 6inches of late spring snow and still be standing, the varieties are Church Wilne 4Y-O part of the English award back in Saint Louis and Best double at the RHS Main Competition, Biggin Hill 4Y-O Best bloom is show at the RHS Main competition 2016 and Ingham Nook 4 Y-O Best Div 4 Daffodil society 2017
Roger and Terry Braithwaite Bramcote Bulbs
Interesting discussion. Here in middle TN doubles will blast on occasion and often will have green on the back or will not open symmetrically, but mainly tazettas blast here. ‘Avalanche’ and white tazettas seem to be the worst; I hardly ever see a bloom on a large patch of ‘Avalanche’ I planted years ago. Some years the whole plant turns to mush; some years just the buds do. This year I saw a few measly blooms, a rarity, but the plants do seem to survive. Finally I overplanted a more reliable daffodil over the patch of ‘Avalanche’ so I had some blooms to see there. ‘Fencourt Jewel’ does a little better with a bloom some years. The tazettas that do the best here are the poetaz ones or the ones with poeticus in their genes which seems to be the colorful ones (yellows and oranges). ‘Falconet’ and ‘Martinette’ and similar ones are very reliable here. I tried planting one block of tazettas that a cold frame I had would fit over and that seemed to help them survive and I got more blooms, but the plants grew taller than the cold frame and it was just not convenient to use, taking the cold frame off so the plants could get rain and then putting it back on when the temperatures were going down.
But, as suggested, many tazettas grow around the hot, dry shores of the Mediterranean Sea. Maybe in your climate they do not get the hot, dry baking that they need.