this video is brought to you by Osmocote the planters plant food hi i'm greg Speicher director of hilltop gardens here at Indiana University and today we're going to talk about dividing daffodil bulbs and why would you need to do that when sometimes they're only twenty-five or fifty cents apiece because new varieties with the pinks and reds and some really cool ones are up to fifty to a hundred and five dollars a bulb so that's not the kind we normally buy but if someone gives them two I want to make sure I make them go as far as I can but even your inexpensive ones need to be divided every now and then so we're going to show you how to do that these have been in for three years these are regular King Alfred's or Carlton and so we're going to divide those and show you how what to do okay first you got to find them in this area we've got them fairly densely planted they're on one foot centers you just sort of dig around to you find some bulbs there's some try not to cut through them there you go so now we got our bulbs up I'll show you how to divide them so now that we've got them found we found our bulbs we kind of pull them out like this some of them bent a little chopped on from when we planted our annuals in here see what else we can find in here here's some here's some sort of look for them see what you can get we have the bulbs we found what we want to divide generally you're going to see them like this we're going to have two three five seven or more and you're going to have things like that the ones that have been damaged this isn't bad as long as it has the discs at the bottom which is basically the stem of the bulb these are just leaves so once you have some of that you can actually actually practically that's how they cut them up into little pieces and make more and then you just break these up into little scales okay so these are actually new little daffodil bulbs starting right here okay so you want to just you just plant this back in the ground it will come up maybe not flower next year but the year after that so if you have really expensive bulbs don't worry you haven't killed them and then these right here it's nice we don't have any roots on them yet and just brush them off and now we've got three bulbs instead of one we plant these back in the ground you get a whole little clump these all came from basically the same hole so it's now nice that now we have instead of one bulb that was planted three years ago we've got one two three four five six seven eight bulbs to put back in the ground so that's an eight eight hundred percent increase so if you're going to buy a bulb and it's going to be like twenty or thirty dollars you want to treat yourself do it because you know in a few years you're going to have more than enough to deal with so what you want to do then is just take them back push them in the ground this is nice and loose now it's getting down about six to eight inches space them out so that's it you get these all in spring rains will come or you can water them in and get them started early I'm Greg Spiker director hilltop gardens at Indiana University and that's the dirt on daffodils