Texas Daffodil Show

Northeast Texas ended up with about 400 fruit tree chilling hours, normal winter is in the 800 to 900 chilling hours. There were just over 100 total hours between Oct and March 1 that were below freezing. etweather.tamu.edu/chill/

This affected bloom season for the various families of daffodils. We have been enjoying daffodil blooms in this region since mid-December. Early varieties were coming into full bloom middle of Feb. this happens about one out of eight years?

A few blooms came in from Indiana, Missouri and Virginia. I was involved with Judges School lll. We have a LOT of newer daffodil people entering. We ran out of wood bases for our single stem tubes and had to switch over to using 3 stem tubes for single entries just about 30 minutes before we cut off entering for judging to begin. We did not have any Div. 10’s nor 9’s that made it into the show. In this region some of the best late season show flowers have not put buds up above ground yet.

Is there any group that has culled or changed out their glass 1” diameter test tubes and are no longer using these tubes for your shows? We are looking to purchase another 100 glass tubes as our shows are out growing the numbers of properties that we have. We have 100 extra wood bases for the vases of three. So we only need extra 1” diameter test tubes to fit these. I can make extra wood bases for the single stem tubes as we have several hundred extra single stem tubes and we have plenty of mini tubes and bases.

Anyway it was fun to use up so many tubes and bases that we had to use coke bottles to create a 40 stem flower ID for the Student judges to use for flower ID.

As usual Rod Armstrong swept through collecting many of the major awards. His Tuggle entry was superb as was the American Bred collection. I did not work on tabulation as I was assisting with Judges School on Friday and helping around all day Saturday.

We are not sure yet if we really had that many extra single stem entries or if there was a missing box of bases in a garage or barn somewhere.

We had a large number of Novice and Small Growers sections. Youth had a good number of blooms. We have a Master Gardener section that had to be spread out to two tables. Historics took up most of two tables or more? Several other special classes tables were filled. Classics had good flowers in their classes. I think we filled 90 some vases of three? I am not sure who we had taking photos.

Keith Kridler Mt. Pleasant, Texas, rain falling this morning.

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