How to Plant and Grow Daffodil Bulbs

Daffodils and narcissi are the most popular flower bulbs grown in Britain: good value, very tough, and coming in a wide range of colours, sizes, and shapes.

When to Plant Daffodils

Plant dry daffodil bulbs in early autumn, ideally September, and potted bulbs or bulbs in the green in early spring.

How to Plant Daffodils

1. Prepare the ground if you are planting in beds. Daffodils are not fussy and only need half-decent drainage and a reasonable amount of organic matter.
2. Plant at random, uneven spacings for a natural look. Scattered drifts of 10-15 bulbs, planted in a circle to form a clump faster work well.
3. Plant your bulbs at least twice, but preferably three times as deep as they are tall.
   They flower and naturalise better if they are planted deeper. If you don’t plant deep enough, they will “come up blind” and not flower.
4. If drainage is poor, put a handful of grit or horticultural sand underneath each bulb, along with the bulb starter Rootgrow.

Aftercare

Daffodils are growing in Winter and Spring, and are dormant by Summer, so they rarely need watering in rainy Britain.
Still, be ready to water them in case there is dry weather in their first Spring.

Deadhead the spent flowers to stop them producing seeds: you want all that energy to go down into the bulbs, which will multiply and be able to produce more flowers the following season.
Just cut the tops with the seed pods off, leave the rest of the flower stem in place to photosynthesise.

As with all flower bulbs, do not tidy up the foliage until at least 6 weeks after flowering, when it withers and dies back.
For this reason, it’s best to choose early flowering varieties if you are naturalising daffodils in your lawn: they sooner their leaves die back, the sooner you can mow the grass.

When mature clumps of daffodils get congested and stop flowering well, lift the bulbs after the foliage withers to replant them in Autumn.

Planting Companions

Because daffodils are gone by mid-Spring, they should be planted in conjunction with things that come into their own in Summer.
Late flowering bulbs like Alliums and Irises are great, and geraniums (not pelargoniums), then peonies, then phlox, and then dahlias.