I still need to get out and take exact same photos of these patches from the same spot. #7118 is a close up of a gap where you can see from the green grass I scattered a couple of handfuls of the nitrogen so that by March the grass was greening up AND the daffodil foliage was greening up. There is a definite gap almost like disease where I did not fertilize.
Then #189 shows up this gap WAY at the back of this photo but you can see from the wide angle view that the ENTIRE row of several thousand Golden Dawns popped up and bloomed like crazy after sitting there waiting for about 5 years…..
Back to n. Obvalaris. This is one that for us it multiplies like crazy. You plant them out and they have great blooms. Next year you still have great blooms but now instead of a single bulb you have 6 bulbs and one bloom. The next year you have 2 blooms out of 20 bulbs. The third fourth and fifth years less than half the clumps are blooming.
Again most of this goes back to WAY too many leaves in the clump trying to capture sunlight energy. This is especially what happens when you plant in solid blocks. In naturalized settings with a clump separated by several feet from the next clump you at least have all of the outside bulbs in the clump getting direct sunlight. Also these clumps of daffodils are quickly mining all of the soil nutrients that are available or within reach of the roots of these bulbs.
Weeds and grasses growing up around clumps of daffodils are JUST as damaging to the food production for next years flowers and bulbs as is cutting off the foliage too quickly. If weeds or trees or bushes shade out the bulbs cutting off the sunshine then no matter how good your soil is you are NOT going to have the size and or number of blooms next year.
I will get soil samples sent off in a couple of weeks to see how my soil is improving where the Golden Dawn is located. I want Nitrogen to be low in my soils during the summer when bulbs are dormant. Keith Kridler Mt. Pleasant, Texas