The VERY BEST place to buy your daffodils will be directly from the specialty growers/hybridizers of daffodils! These growers walk all of the rows of their daffodils at all seasons of the year! They are aware of how each variety of daffodil is supposed to look as the leaves sprout, buds and blooms pop up and as the various plants die down. These growers soils and the bulbs are inspected.
Issue to me is that most individual daffodil, back flower bed type growers/show exhibitors will be “variety collectors” where we trade and share bulbs from yards and fields that are NOT inspected. Especially the first 10 years or so into our “hobby” when we are just getting started.
We ALL know not to use a knife or hand pruners to cut daffodil bloom stems, for fear of spreading virus from one infected bulb to the next bulb. It is bad enough to grasp and snap off the stems with our fingers. Go look at videos where the massive bulb farms still use mowing machines to cut off just the buds of tulips/daffodils to increase bulb size.
Even these larger farms will have strict inspections, pretty common for daffodil growers in Northern, north America to find either the large or small bulb fly. An insect that is easy to hear and see, damage that is more easy to detect.
Then compare the large bulb fly to a daffodil virus or two that will show up one year then appear to disappear for multiple years, only for the symptoms to re-appear again, when the bulb is under stressful growing conditions. We cannot see or detect the actual virus, we need to send off a test sample to a reputable lab tech.
http://www.nematologists.org/ask_the_experts/
The link above takes you to the list of Nematode experts that are willing to answer questions and or some run private laboratories where you can check with them to see if they would be able to identify a particular species of nematode from a particular sample. These are the experts for North America, their society is based out of Ohio.
Diseases and Pests of daffodils need to be discussed from year to year, unpleasant as some of this maybe during show season. For many people as soon as daffodil bloom season is over daily walks among the daffodils end. Just picked our first poets in bloom the last four days.
Keith Kridler
Mt. Pleasant, Texas
Flooding rains on the way again!