"Cheeeeeeese, Grommit!"
Illoquin, question?
OMG! I LOVE Wallace and Gromit!!!
LOL, as you should!!!
Hey! I bought a stuffed animal Gromit in Bath, England!
LOL, I have W&G slipper socks that my MIL sent me one Christmas as well as a few PG TIPS W&G trinkets around here somewhere.
do you travel to England often?
Not often enough. We were there in May for my MIL's passing & funeral, so I suspect that we will be going back even less often than before. DH's brother and extended relatives are still there though...
This message was edited Feb 13, 2008 7:34 PM
I'm sorry about your m-i-l. We have been to England twice. DH would move there in a heartbeat. We even watch BBC all the time
My daffodils usually get very tall and blow over. Why?
because it is windy :-)
My first experience with them was at college - they had a garden area west of campus and one of the hills was planted with naturalized daffys - they'd been there for years so it was breathtaking when you got there at the right time of the year.
Is it possible for them to flop over if they're planted too shallow?
Not enough sun?
we're dancin' in the dark, waiting for Illoquin - LOL!!
Uh, yes to all the above? Mine would never dare to flop, :)) so I can't say, although if they are some 100 year old varieties, then their stems just aren't as strong as the new ones.
If they lean and face down, they could have been frozen, been without water, not had enough sun, been too crowded...a lot of things.... Usually wind causes a twisted stem because the daffodil perianth is lie a weather vane in that it will swing around to be parallel with the wind. Daffodils also face the sun, so it can be quite confusing to the flower on the stem in deciding which was to face.
If they are BENT, as in creased and face down, then you had some really bad weather and the flowers won't recover for this year.
I saw this page about a naturally floppy daffodil the other day, Narcissus tazetta 'Minnow'. Looks neat:
http://www.paghat.com/narcissusminnow.html
Yes, Minnow can be nice. It's especially nice the first year it comes from Holland because those nice Dutch flowers are inside that flower bulb. After it's here (the miswestern US) I would say it goes downhill a bit, never to recover the former glory of its first year planted from purchased Dutch Bulbs.
Suzy
Suzy, I remember you saying it was easy at times to tell the difference between Dutch and US bulbs because of their size - the Dutch bulbs are fat and sassy - is it their soil, in addition to the fact they don't really let those things bloom? Is there some kind of fertilizer of something we could add or something we could do for our Daffs so they continue to bloom as nicely as they did their first year or two?
Robin
No, it's the water, and especially the water when the bulbs need it, then no water when they don't need it. They have those windmills and dykes (actually pumps and dykes now, but windmills sounds so much prettier) and the agricultural (bulb) areas can actually raise and lower the water. They grow in sandy silt, and about 1/3 of The Netherlands is actually underwater as it is a major delta for 2 rivers and then the North Sea is right there....Sort of like New Orleans and the southern most parishes in Louisiana.
Every year I get a Christmas Card in the mail from a bulb grower there showing a field of Tulips growing in rows like corn. His son, though, is more hip, and very fun. He sent email right after the new year and it is a photo of a giant tractor with a large rotary blade up in the air taking the heads of off tulips in full bloom! Talk about sad! And funny. Mostly sad. They need to see them bloom to make sure the rogues are few in number.
If you want big fat bulbs, you need to give them lots and lots of water, and grow them in silty-sand enriched with finished compost, but they'll never be as big as the Dutch-grown ones because in The Netherlands they have water *underneath* the bulbs, where the roots are and the bulbs don't actually get very wet. Because of our clay, you can water too much, and because of our rainfall (or the hose) our water passes over the bulbs, soaking them in the process. We can have too much water too late, when the bulbs should be curing, and then they rot, because of the clay and hot soil temperatures. If we had sandy silt, I'm sure it would be fine.
They have pretty big bulbs in the Pacific Northwest.
So, no unless you have an underground spring, we can't get those giant fat bulbs, or those extermely long stems, or those gigantic flowers in Indiana. You can fertilize them, though, with a 10-10-10 as soon as the folige peeps up in Feb, then a 6-24-24 (onion fertilizer) when they start to bud, and again when they (collectively) finish blooming. Then again right before a cold rain in late Sept. Always the low nitrogen except when they are starting a burst of upward growth.
sigh....thank you! Fertilizer it must be...
What ever would I do without you and Tuink and Seandor and Critter and Equil and - I know I'm forgetting others - to help me??
Come over to get some 6-24-24 -- I usually have oodles of it and it's hard to find anywhere except an ag store. In Scottsburg, IN, near Leota, there is an ag store that has 6-24-24 enriched with Calcium, and that is supposed to be better yet.
Do you remember the name of the store? I could ask my sis to pick some up.
The Farm Burra Coop. (You have to say it, not read it LOL!)
It should be the road that's right by The Findley Firestation that connects to Bloomington Trail. Can't think of it.
I'll haveta see if I can find that the next time I'm down there (which will be soon - she's got a rack of my seeds!).
Boy you all are getting close to me. I think you are on Indiana St Rd 56 between Scottsburg and Salem.
dryad is your sis inn Scottsburg?
Actually it is not too close but here in the country we call you neighbor if you live within 5 miles. Tha t is probably 12 miles from me.
Yep - actually she's just east of Scottsburg on 30 acres - and I get to garden there to my heart's content - LOL! Makes up for my little plot here in the city - PLUS she's in a different Zone - LOL! A good friend of hers is the Equine vet in Austin - they really are your "neighbors"!
Yes, that's exactly it, IndyNanny but I don't know the name of the road that the Farm Burra is on....It might be Findley Road. It is NOT on SR 56, but you might be able to see the sign from there.
Guess I need to get down there and drive around. I was thinking about a feed store on 56 going toward Salem but that is a Kent store and not the Farm Bureau Co-op.
Maybe that Kent Store is it -- doesn't matter, really, they'd have 6-24-24. You could call them and ask if it has Calcium added.
Suzy
I think I'm going to be down there in a day or two - I'll find it and let you know :)