Late winter- south side of the house Daffodil growth. Later or earlier then last year?

South side of house grass.

Today the Daffodils which sprouted on the south side of my house in the February 50.F warm-up got to enjoy there first March sun after being under snow for weeks. As per usual the famous south sunny side of my house is proving to be warm spot, the snow has already long melted from the house exposing grass. Even when we got 1 inch of snow yesterday it had no problem melting off quickly there.




Daffodil sprouts March 10th 2011

The strong March sun proved it's self today. Grass patches in areas that were very wind whipped in the late February snowstorm are getting larger each day, but we have a long ways to go before we see any significant grass because there are spots in the yard with 3 feet deep drifts, but still with the grass patches and warm sun, the feeling of Spring was in the air!
Underground warmth taller daffodils March 10th 2011

This new addition patch of daffodils I added last year at the very end of the garden are oddly twice as tall as the rest of the ones sprouting on the same side of the house. I couldn't figure out why until I stuck my shovel into the ground, when I did there was no frost in the ground at all, which was odd to me because the rest of the south side had at least a thin layer of frost to about 1 inch. What I believe caused this is something warm, like the hot water pipes to our wood stove must go near this spot, because it is the only spot that had no frost. The spotter was literally only about a foot or two wide with an abrupt end on all sides, one way to see this difference is the sprouting daffodils on the right side of the picture are smaller because that's where there was frost in the soil the longest, the daffodils continue to get smaller as you continue to go even more to the right of those ones. If these will flower this year, I would suspect I should see a flower bud fairly soon!


Everyone should remember this patch from last year! This is the same bunch of daffodils that I found sitting in a pot party buried in the ground last February. I was happy to see these sprouting again, hopefully to provide a nice show in the next couple months!

Comparing these daffodils to last year I found that in height they are much further behind this year, which was expected, but in the date they sprouted was actually 2 days earlier then last year due to our February thaw. I will be watching closely to the Souths side this year because with the planting of new even earlier kinds flowering bulbs last fall, any significant warm ups could break my earliest date for a spring flower bloom, especially those daffodils that are twice as tall as the others!