April 30th, 2020 - cottage garden plants, Pots and containers, Spring bulbs

If you have a small garden like a town garden and want to grow daffodils, here are my tips on how best to do it, learned over the years by trial and error. When we have no meadow, no mossy bank, no swathes, no fields, no seas of daffodils, how can we have a splash of yellow and deal with them when they’re over?

Daffodils in a terracotta pot

Firstly, recall that I look out the window at every inch of my front and back garden every day of the year. There are no hidden bits or out of the way corners. Everything is visible. So the questions is, what do I want to look out on?

daffodils in pots

I couldn’t live without daffodils and I wrote here about how I choose the short early ones because I want to see yellow in February as soon as possible after winter. You can of course have daffodils in April but I don’t buy those. By April the garden is a jungle of new growth and daffodils would be lost in it.

This year I had them in pots at the back door for us to look at and in troughs out the front for passers by to enjoy.

Daffodils in a small garden

Wonderful splash of yellow in February

They flowered from early February to mid April and looked wonderful.

BUT what to do when the flowers are over. If I want to leave the bulbs in to flower next year they would have to be left to die down naturally taking 2 months. Do I want to look at this picture below for 2 months while the leaves die down?

Daffodil leaves after the flowers are over

No, I don’t. And I’d like the space for something else.

But here below is a pot where the daffodils have very thin leaves and the other things in the pot will distract the eye till they die down so I can leave them in.

Daffodil leaves less obvious in a mixed pot

Here below is a pot full of daffodils which are now over. I need the pot for other things.

spent daffodils don’t look great

For a pot like this, I lift them out with a fork or just tug a little, easy because they are not deep. Here they are just after lifting.

Daffodils lift out easily from their containers

Some daffodil bulbs have thin delicate leaves

I throw them in a pile in my sunniest corner.

Daffodil leaves dying down in hot sun

The leaves turn yellow as they age, soaking up the sun’s energy to feed the bulb for next year. When the leaves have disintegrated I’ll keep the bulbs dry in the shed and replant in September.

Here below is how they look today. Fading away nicely.

Leaves soaking up the sun to feed the bulb

I can’t stress enough how uplifting it is to look out at a splash of little yellow daffodils in February when days are still short and Spring seems weeks away. Those early varieties are quite cheap to buy in bulk and say 50 in a couple of pots will do the trick. I hope you’ll make a plan to order some for planting in September – gardening being all about looking ahead.

Suggested sources: bulbs.co.uk    blomsbulbs.com