Sandy’s Corner

I have been thinking about how many daylily seedlings from the 2025 harvest I can realistically fit in the various gardens. High level, I am looking for space for whatever low volume seedlings I get from the seeds from last year’s harvest. Practically, I am looking for a way to enjoy groupings of the different daylily lines I have going.

Perhaps a 30,000 foot description on how I designed the gardens at the townhome would be a good idea to begin with.

In front, it is very much “landscape garden” style. Neat rows, lots of repetition. Not very creative, but it looks nice and uniform. And I don’t allow forget-me-nots out front. I keep it more formal. Increasingly I have also considered curtailing the number of crosses I do out front. It gets warm out front in the afternoons, and I much prefer to be out back at that time of day. I also have those same daylilies out back now, so in reality I don’t need to be out front doing any crosses.

Out back is where I have my actual “garden” areas. It is where I relax, where I have my coffee in the morning sun and where we sit out and chat as the shade begins to cover part of the patio. It is way more creative, and daydreamy. It is often where neighbors stop by to chat. And it is also where our dog Sandy used to sit with us, basking in warmth until the shade arrived. He so loved that. We will definitely miss having him with us there.

I have been considering naming the part of the gardens where Sandy most often sat, “Sandy’s Corner”. I am thinking “Sandy’s Corner” will be where the South Seas and Coral Majority self-seed and crosses will be planted go forward. Coral Majority is outrageously fun, and South Seas is very relaxing to look at. I like the idea of that combo.

I have a sneaking suspicion “Sandy’s Corner” will be my favorite look, and I will allow that to be the predominant results that remain in the townhome gardens, but we shall see.

As for the historic work, I am hoping to have those results primarily up north. Maybe some at the historic cemetery. Time will tell.

And the rest of the crosses, I think they can go by their parents. The forget-me-nots will be greatly reduced, but that is ok.

Take care! Be Blessed!

Firsts for 2026 Gardening Season

We have firsts in the 2026 garden!

We still have a few tulips in the back garden that come up each year. Those started to pop up a few days ago.

And then the first of the daylilies are up.

On ‘Autumn Red’, the various clumps out front are starting to show greens.

‘Autumn Red’ is our oldest (historic) daylily in the gardens. It had a bountiful harvest of seeds from 2025 crosses (84 of which are already planted in seedling trays). It also has 2025 seedlings from 2024 crosses I did.

I’m not surprised to see the “Autumn Red’ daylilies are already up this year. They are super hardy.

The daylily I am calling Equal Opportunity is also starting to come up.

Equal Opportunity is from my work with ‘South Seas’ self-seed, and it bloomed last year for the first time. Equal Opportunity did not accept a pod parent attempt last year. It is slated to be tried again this year, as both a pod and pollen parent.

And then, of course, ‘Pink Tirzah’ is up.

Now it will go fast with new greens popping up daily.

Have a wonderful weekend!

Seeds are started

Well, I was going to plant just a few 6 cell seedling trays and put on the greenhouse covers but I got a tad ambitious today. 84 of the daylily seeds are now planted. Still a lot to go, but it’s a start.

Today’s planting work was exclusively with the Autumn Red crosses. And 3 Autumn Red self-seeds 😉 I will stop there until last frost has passed. The bulk of the daylily seeds always get planted then, and that is my favorite way to handle the seeds. Then they go directly into the seedling boxes outside and get way more sun 🙂

It definitely was a fun day. An accomplishment day. It was also a very confirming day. Every priority and decision I have been sharing regarding the daylilies was reinforced.

My best decision, hands down, was all the research and documentation work I tackled over the past year. It saved me from a lot of stress today. Throughout the day I found myself thinking that if I had not done all that work, I would have been sunk. It was just way too much to go on memory and pictures and a few journal notes like I used to. The practice of ongoing research and documentation will be a keeper, even though it is extra work. The payoff is huge.

Secondly, I absolutely confirmed today that both the scope and the volume of what I did for crosses last year was too far for my ongoing comfort level. A stretch year, ok. I was still toying at that point with a number of ideas I have now counted out. I am not going to start a daylily farm lol. I am not going to ship daylilies around. I am not going to grow volume and sell at farmers markets – egads! No! Just No! Not at all me. So today as I was planting dozens of seeds from the same daylily cross, those activities went even further to confirm my decisions are right-sized and me appropriate. I now have a pretty good idea of what I can do with crosses between what we have – what consistently makes seed, which daylilies play well together … Now I am looking to see what I can do with specific crosses at low volume and then working with the results of those crosses and also the self-seed. I like to putz, and putz I shall do going forward 😉

Third, after I researched more on historic daylilies, and the intersection of what I like for form and color, I am super comfortable with where I am with the historic idea at this point. If I can get some daylilies older than Hyperion, that would be great, but I’m still also good if I don’t.

So, indeed, putzing is a great word to describe what I envision going forward. That, and seeing if I can finally get a garden going up north. I think if anything will make it, the older daylilies should. The Autumn Red seeds are planted. If they come up, some will go up. Little by little.

I hope you have a great week. We have plans with one of the grands tomorrow, so no Tuesday post. My next post will probably be Friday 🙂

Be Blessed!

Brunch, and then time to get the seedling mini greenhouses set up

It is time to start getting ready to plant daylily seeds. But first, the chef made brunch. Lots of vegies, and cheese, of course.

After that delicious sustenance, it was time to start putting the new seedling mini greenhouses together.

I have decided to decorate lightly for Easter this year. I remember all the work it was to put away the full “everything out” Christmas decorations in January, and I am just not in the mood for an Easter version repeat. Seedling trays will make an early appearance this year, where the ceramic Easter eggs would normally go. But don’t worry, we still celebrate the actual meaning of Easter, every day, in our hearts 🙂

One last look before planting wave one of the daylily seeds. These seedling planters will never be this clean again 😉

I will share as we go.

I hope you have a wonderful week ahead!

Historic Abundance

We are past our most recent blizzard, past our sub-zero weather last night, and now we are starting to see larger numbers of Robins. It is a wonderful moment on this St. Patrick’s Day, and I am hoping that Spring truly is beginning.

And so, after the long wait, with lots of computer time to keep my mind “garden happy”, we will soon be starting to plant daylily seeds. A few weeks yet, but soon.

While I waited for this time to arrive, I continued to work on the Historic part of what I want to do with the daylilies. I recently took the time to look up the introduction dates of our daylily inventory, spurred on by the discovery that Autumn Red is 85 years old. I found that many of our daylilies are technically considered historic. The AHS (American Daylily Society) classifies a daylily as historic if it is 30 years old or older. Most (all but four) of our daylilies are older than that, and some are quite a bit older. A large portion of our inventory has been crossed, which, of course means that my work with historic daylilies is technically much farther along than I thought. I still want to work with old, old, old daylilies, but wow! Now my mind is full. And I needed to know more. So, I dug deeper.

Along the way, researching parentage of the older of the historic daylilies, I also discovered that ploidy was often changed with a thing called colchicine. What in the world!!! Yah, I can write on that in another blog, but colchicine is responsible for getting us tetraploids, and since South Seas (a tetraploid) is my best self-seeder, and the entire focus of my 2026 planned daylily crosses, I then started to wonder – do tetraploid self-seed daylilies ever go back to their farther back parentage and then change ploidy, back to diploid? I know some of our South Seas self-seed results are pod fertile, and that they cross with tetraploids, because I did crosses and got seed. Whether that seed goes to seedling will be seen in a few months, and bloom years out. But this year I only plan to add four daylily crosses, and they are all from South Seas self-seed. Two of them are with Hello Yellow (whose parentage is unknown) gasp! And one is with two South Seas self-seed. Oy! What am I doing? And will I start creating situations where ploidy changes? I need more research! 😉

And that is what I have been up to.

There is so much to learn! I think I will probably be very busy researching until the daylilies start to bloom. That is a very good thing.

In the meantime, todays pics are holiday appropriate – shamrocks that I over-winter.

Be Blessed!

Good belly laugh

The topic of decluttering and use it or lose it is always something I give attention to. Simplifying is very freeing. In addition to physical space, it also frees up mind space.

As I look back at old garden pictures and documentation it is fun to remember the different things we have had in our gardens AND it is nice to be where we are. I remember the days of fighting aphids on huge hibiscus, trying to get forced bulbs to keep from falling over, starting shipments of seeds that looked awesome in catalogues and never gave us one single vegetable, and worse, some flower seeds never even germinated. I am glad to have simplified and to be done with all of that. And I will be comfortable to finally make the call after Easter that the Malva Zebrina Hollyhock seeds were stored too long and were not viable. It is time to get to just daylily seeds. Not just this year but going forward.

I am also very happy I had time this week to make a totally new, much more simplified configuration of my garden tracking spreadsheet. Everything that needs action is in there and I can pull from the one data sheet to make pivots for specific views. That is nice, and a long time coming. Lots of data, lots of iterations.

And after a dozen hours poring over old notes and old labels and packets and photos, the only unknown left is the parentage of Hello Yellow. Something tells me that Hello Yellow is having a good belly laugh and that I will ultimately find out it was a Purple D’Oro self-seed that went to its parentage of … Stella De Oro. We shall see. That would not make sense, as it has created seed with a cross with Just Plum Happy, a tetraploid. But, I guess, it would be belly laugh funny. Given that I am not a Stella gardener.

We are forecasted to have a pretty substantial snowfall this weekend. I am thankful it seems the mass arrival of robins has not yet occurred, and I am thankful I disciplined myself to not start daylily seeds in trays. It’s not time yet.

Have a wonderful weekend!

March “Gardening” Begins – Optimizing, Oldies Get One More Chance, and a Little Bit of Acquiring

March is here! Time to kick off the slow start to garden planting time.

Early this week I transplanted our 9-year-old, non-blooming orchid into a much smaller pot where it now is in exclusively orchid planting medium. I hope it works.

The pot the orchid was previously in now has some new “residents”. Some very old, harvested seeds from one of my previous gardens finally got to see potting soil this week. If they make it (which I highly doubt due to the age of the seed) we will have Malva Zebrina Hollyhocks in the garden here. They self-seed, so they are kind of like a perennial.

Then, in a good place after that cleanup work, I turned my thoughts to the next “to do” on the 2026 garden plan. I ordered 3 Hyperion daylilies. They, as I have mentioned in other posts, are part of the longer-term plan. They will be delivered in spring, bare root, so they won’t bloom for a year or so. That is perfectly fine. We will be patient.

And finally, although this next item was not entirely needed, and something I generally like to avoid, I am hopeful it is at least a short-term solution. As I continued to consider the volume of daylily seeds that need to be planted this spring, my mind turned toward optimizing some awkward space under support bars in the three new seedling boxes I bought last year. I measured the space, and I did a quick look online at options. Surprise, surprise, I found a good option at a good price. I made the purchase. The small 6 cell “greenhouses” will be putzy to plant, and that type of seed starting is not the norm for me, but you never know – those little seedling trays may be incredible.

And talk about incredible – as I wrote this post, the grill master was also at work. Yes, it was as delicious as it looks 😉

Be Blessed!

We are garden ready. It is Waiting Time.

We are moving closer and closer into the “Do” phase of Spring gardening 2026. March starts next week, and although we will almost certainly get more snow, March also begins clean-up in the garden. Today is the last 2026 garden planning post. All that is left to share is my vision for the daylily garden I am starting up north this year.

I have been thinking about undisturbed old homesites, sometimes where the house is even gone, maybe the chimney and foundation are the only things still evident, maybe not even that, but around the homesite are sometimes daylily survivors. They found a way. No special care. Just sunshine and soil and rain.

I have been doing some research, and apparently older, more legacy, or historic daylilies do better as a whole than the newer hybrids in surviving without much care. That is what I am aiming for with the up north daylilies – not much care. So, note to self – don’t buy hybrids and bring them up north. (Sadly, many years back, I actually lost one of my initial Pink Tirzah bare root seedlings that way, in my epic fail first generation garden trial up north. Big ouch. Shall not be repeated.)

I am not interested in the orange ditch daylilies, but I am going to add a time tested, historic style daylily (Hyperion) to the townhome garden this year and begin the slow process of growing them from bare root to bloom, letting them self-seed, and seeing if I can get that self-seed to grow up north where they can naturalize. I know it will be a very slow process. Probably 5 years or more. But that’s ok. In the meantime, this year I will work on the hybrid seedling garden up north, planting the excess hybridized seeds from the Red and the Pink Tirzah cross, and see if they can make it. Those red daylilies are quite hardy. It could work. But my goal is to eventually get naturalized daylilies up north.

So now I wait. It will be a couple months until I can start the 2026 seedlings outside. I may start some indoors in trays after Easter. I did crosses with Naomi Ruth and the Peach daylily – both ways, as pod parent each and as pollen parent each, and that was very successful to seed. I may get those going indoors. But otherwise, it is waiting time now. I’ll share as we have fun things 🙂

Take care, Be Blessed!

We reflect. We are Thankful.

In early January, as our dog Sandy was really struggling, I started this post. As you know, Sandy now has his “wings”. Four weeks ago, today, he got his wings. We miss him dearly. We are so tempted to adopt another dog. But those days are gone. We are being called on to a new direction. Time will tell more.

Here’s the post from early January:

Well, the time for “cozy plus” has come. We are going to reach -21 F tonight (actual temperature, not including wind chill calculations). Now, I have been out in -40F with crazy winds where the prediction was wind chills were -90 F, and let me just say, challenging yourself to walk around in a college campus at 19 years old in that weather was novel. But all these years later, -21 F is “I shall stay inside” time. And to keep my deep winter sanity, my mind is increasingly wandering. You know – a flash of remembrance of a beautiful day volunteering, working on the historic cemetery garden, a flash of a memory of picking up mulch, a flash of a memory of seeing “Hello Yellow” for the first time of the season (last year “Hello Yellow” was the first, and the last daylily to bloom). Stuff like that.
So I am opening the gardening season, just a tiny trickle. Just to keep sane. I hope it works. (Going to TX right now is not an option 😉).

At the end of last year’s garden season I shared that in 2026 I was definitely not going to do as many daylily crosses as I did in 2025, and I was considering taking a year off of doing any crosses at all. I shared how much I was enjoying what the bees and birds and butterflies and wind already accomplish. I shared that I had a desire to go historic for a while, as well, and that I had located sources for those. That is where the planning left off. Since then, I am questioning if I will be able to start the historic daylily idea. The sources went crickets when I asked for availability. I did that specific ask because I saw conflicting information online, and, contrary to my grocery order when substitutions are minor, I want very specific daylilies with those orders. I did consider plowing ahead, and seeing if just ordering would work, but, honestly, I did not have peace about that. So – I am shelving that part of the 2026 plan. And that may be a good thing. I think 2026 is going to be plenty busy, and this rooky hybridizer is going to need all the capacity – energy and real estate – she can muster.

Likewise, I have a decision about another 2025 plan.

Last year I shared that at the historic cemetery there is a family site that was proposed for a garden build out. The plants were to potentially come from the main (fence) garden areas and would be perennial. I was reading about Quiet gardens and thought it was a match for the site. But as I started to plant, it felt very “off”. I will not go into the details, but I called it quits for the year. After discussion with others, the decision to call that work quits for good was made. I think it will be a maintenance issue, and I don’t want to create a weedy, confusing mess for future volunteers.

So, the new garden at the family site at the historic cemetery is off the 2026 plan, and the historic daylily buildout is off the 2026 plan (that one may have a 2027 comeback – we shall see).

And now I can plan the rest. Because I am definitely concerned about capacity in 2026 – regarding both my energy and real estate. Here’s why:

I harvested over 500 daylily seeds last fall.

Last year, from 2024 harvested seeds, I had over 75% germination and survival to planted daylily seedling.

With the exception of the set of three ‘Mahala’ daylily seedlings at the gate of the historical cemetery, which clearly had a digging incident, all the others survived to frost. From experience I am guessing 70% or so of those will survive the winter and re-emerge in spring.

In 2026 I would guess that of the over 500 seeds from the 2025 harvest, I will be very busy finding real estate for seedlings.

And last year’s seedlings will need to stay put,

and the 2024 seedlings may need dividing.

So, time to plan. And no scope creep. 2025 got outta control lol Shall not repeat.

In a few weeks I will put the 2025 harvested daylily seeds in the refrigerator for stratification. And then the season will begin.

I left that post sit for almost 2 months. I just wasn’t up for finishing it at the time.

Today, on February 26, 2026, our weather is gradually warming up. The 2026 garden plan is complete. And we are thankful for many blessings. We will focus on those and also enjoy a beautiful picture of the Red and the Pink Tirzah daylilies from last July. Oh, so fun! Hundreds of seeds from intentional crosses with those daylilies – with Red as the pod parent and Pink Tirzah as the pollen parent, with Pink Tirzah as the pod parent and Red as the pollen parent, and with other pollen and pod parents with Red and with Pink Tirzah.

May the daylilies bring many more years of enjoyment and pure beauty!

The year to start some daylilies up north

I have a lot of harvested daylily seeds from 2025. If even half of them germinate and go to seedling I will be in trouble in a few years when they start to mature. I have run out of room.

But I knew that last fall. I knew I had harvested 521 daylily seeds and did not have room for them. I knew I didn’t even have enough seedling boxes to germinate and bring them to seedling properly. I have been slowly, steadily, chipping away at a plan.

99 of the 521 seeds were self-seed from the historic cemetery, to be added back this summer. 78 of those seeds were from the existing Stella De Oros there. The Stella De Oro seeds will be direct sown in groups in that garden. I just don’t have capacity in the squirrel protected seedling boxes to germinate those. The other seeds I will attempt to bring to seedling in the seedling boxes, and then transplant them in late summer, as is my cadence. There are already other daylily seedlings I have added at the historic cemetery in past years, and they did pretty well with that method, considering that garden survives on just rainfall for watering. I have hope for another successful set of additions.

In a perennial garden a plan is needed to keep the plants healthy, not overgrown, and also always have a variety of interesting blooms throughout spring-fall each year. We are going into year 4 with the historic cemetery garden and year 23 at the townhome. As always, some dividing will be needed this year. The seedlings from years past should help to keep things interesting while the divisions reestablish. And the rotation will continue each year.

Just as I love working on the townhome gardens, I love working on the historic cemetery garden. It is a great pleasure to have made a beautiful garden to honor those who are interred at the cemetery, as well as delight the neighbors and passersby. But the historic cemetery is not either of our family’s history. We are invested in this community, but we are the first generation in our family with history here. We don’t own that land. We are not even community property owners there as we are at the townhome. Those gardens could be, or may need to be, moved at any time. They are part of my hobby for this snippet of time. A lovely hobby and a lovely snippet of time. AND, at the same time … it is time to plant our own garden. On our own land. Even separate from the townhome gardens.

It will not be smooth sailing. I failed before at a garden up north. It was a colossal weed patch ending fail from an over $300 investment. Back in the day. But quite a few years have passed. I have been studying the topography. I know the area that has decent groundwater. I know the deer have far more nummies elsewhere. A fence will be needed, for sure, and I already have some heavy-duty landscape fabric from my DIL to keep the weeds at bay. I am telling myself, “These are daylilies. They are hardy. This is the year.” Hopefully they survive. The other option is to feed the seeds to the birds lol.

Up north I will start with 80 seeds from the 116 that I have of the cross between the red daylilies and Pink Tirzah. It is the opposite cross of what worked to make seed for the seedlings I named Molly Cowles in 2025. I have a name in mind for the new cross already but first they have to succeed up north. It will not be easy. I am going to do direct sow just like with the Stella De Oro seeds at the historic garden. But I will grow the other 36 seeds (of that same cross) here at the townhouse, just in case. (Seedlings can be grouped until they crowd.)

And we will see. It just takes one to get a field full in the years ahead.

And with that, the rest of the 2025 harvested seeds will have room in our seedling boxes at the townhouse. We are a go. I have the pots, I have the soil, I have some chicken wire to cover the open seedling boxes and can easily get more. We’re set.

Time for spring!!! Yah, I know. Not quite yet.