The hunt is on to find the early blooming daffodils after one Reddit user posted a photo of the yellow flowers in full bloom on Saturday along Dallas Road.
The user stated they would not give the exact location for fear of someone plucking the flowers, and the post garnered comments from others stating more flowers had been spotted blooming in James Bay, Oak Bay and Saanich. Other users wrote they had even seen cherry blossoms.
Spring is coming - spotted some daffodils blooming along Dallas Road today from r/VictoriaBC
According to Ryan Vantreight, general manager of Longview Farms, daffodils will start to poke out of the ground around this time of year, but blooming this early isn’t typical.
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“Yeah, it’s weird,” he says. “It means they’re in a sheltered area, with warmer than usual temperatures.”
Vantreight explains the flowers will start to “pop their heads up” in mid to late January after the cold has gone but in the past couple of years the timeline has been a little off.
“If we’re looking at the way the weather has been going the last 10 years, I don’t know what’s normal this year,” he says. “It’s been very sporadic.”
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Last year the farm lost three million flowers following the heavy dump of snow in February, which is when picking starts. Longview Farms picks the flowers while the buds are still closed, which Vantreight says is best for packaging and shipping them.
By mid-March to April the flowers are in full bloom, meaning the ones on Dallas Road are almost four months early.
Daffodils can survive the cold — Vantreight calls them “hardy flowers” — but what they can’t survive, is the weight of snow and the ones on the farm last year all snapped. For Vantreight, he hopes it’s either a quick cold snap coming up that won’t affect the flowers or a long drawn out one, with no snow, that will help slow down the flower’s growth.
kendra.crighton@blackpress.ca
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