Tag: Garden

Kind of miss these, kind of not. Let’s stick with the South Seas self-seed blooms :)

Yesterday when I was reviewing February 16 pics, I had to do a double take at this one. What was it? Green in February in Minnesota?

The next pic brought more clarity.

That was not cement. It was the inside of a plant pot. And then I remembered. It was the annual big pot of forced daffodils. Here’s the story.

Forcing daffodils was super fun for quite a few years. Eventually, however, I “decluttered” that practice. And to be fully transparent, the progression was not solely with daffodils. I started with buying Watch ‘Em Grow gardens. That was kind of spendy, and the containers were cute but hard to repurpose. I decided to DIY and plant a variety of bulbs in large and medium pots for forcing. After the first few years I went to only daffodils because I was planting jumbo bags full of daffodils at the historic cemetery to repel moles. The leftovers went to the forcing pots and then got planted back at the historic garden in Spring when the ground thawed. But forced bulb stems often fall over in pots and don’t look so awesome. Last year they looked pretty bad in pots. As I planted them at the historic cemetery I decided – that was an era, and that era is done.

A few weeks ago, I was kind of missing the forced bulbs. I saw the pretty arrangements of forced tulips in a vase with the jute cord around the glass container at the warehouse store. So cute! I love that look! But rewind the tape – that jute cord is a mess when trying to wash the vase, AND I know I will never reuse that setup. I gathered my strength and discipline, reminded myself I can look, and enjoy, but also that I had already made a decision, last fall, at that same warehouse store, that I am done with forcing bulbs. To start buying forced bulbs in a glass container with jute around it that I will never reuse is a step backwards. Roll the cart forward.

Yesterday I enjoyed the pics from prior years, just like I enjoyed looking at the creations at the warehouse, AND I successfully stayed in my “now” wheelhouse. Where bulbs go into the ground, if I even buy them (rare anymore), and where worms clean the “containers” (dirt) hahaha!

The wheelhouse nowadays is mostly daylilies. And did you think I would pass up a daylily picture today? Not a chance 😉

Today’s South Seas self-seed daylily is another beauty. For my garden and tracking purposes I named it SS Light. South Seas is SS but SS is also Steamship (historical reference to ships that were prevalent during the time our area was settled). And when SS Light first bloomed, it looked to me like a light version of South Seas. I was ready to steamship ahead. It would definitely stay.

Here are three blooms from the same bunch (SS Light). I decided from the first bloom to also see if SS Light would agree to be a pod parent. Coral Majority was also blooming that day, and I could not resist. That established the cross with SS Light as the pod parent, at least for 2025. Two out of three crosses produced seed. I have a total of 10 seeds from those crosses. We will see if the seeds germinate this Spring. Fingers crossed.

Enjoy!

SS Light x Coral Majority (0 seeds)
SS Light x Coral Majority (3 seeds)
SS Light x Coral Majority (7 seeds)

South Seas self-seed blooms Part 2

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The farther I go down the daylily propagation path, the more curious I get. That is how scope creeps, but also how experience grows. It is a balance. I am finding my parameters.

As I have shared, daylily self-seed harvesting, planting, and growing to bloom is really appealing to me. I worked lots of years with large amounts of data, and am pretty comfortable with analysis, but nowadays I like a little bit closer to granny rocking chair patio relaxing. Thinking, always thinking, but closer to appreciation, and reflection. Specifically, closer to releasing things with volume or timing stress. Creative? Yes. Absolutely, but lower key creative. Helper creative.

The South Seas self-seed blooms pictured above are super interesting. Notice that the coloring is quite similar, but the features are quite different. They are from the same year’s harvest, but, because I previously stored self-seed all together by daylily type, not individual pod, the pollinator efforts and the conditions may have been different (or not). The resulting two blooms pictured above could have come from the same pod, different seed. They could be different pods, same day. They could be same day, different pods, different pollinators (butterfly, bee …). They could be same day but different weather throughout the day. They could also be different pollinators, different conditions, days apart. Oy! And I could track some of that, but why?

For hybridizing, I do much more tracking. And going forward, how much I am willing to track will depend on how narrow I bring the scope. 5-7 various types of crosses sounds really good to me now, but if I start to try to replicate certain features, or eliminate them, more data may be helpful. However, for self-seed, I am not the pollinator (gasp!). And doggone it, the pollinators are notoriously bad at entering their contributions into my spreadsheet. They do not identify who stopped by, when, or to which bloom(s).

A little more relaxing and just enjoying for these is the message and the theme. That balance sounds good to me this year.

I hope you enjoy today’s pic, and I hope you have a wonderful day!

South Seas Self-Seed Blooms

One of the things that has fascinated me is the results of our harvested South Seas daylily self-seed. Those are daylily blooms that result from harvesting seed that pollinators (not me ;)) create. It amazes me how beautiful they turn out, yet with no work from me but to harvest the seed, go through the planting sequence the next spring (stratification, to seedling, protect, plant in late summer), and wait. And sometimes wait and wait and wait lol

A large part of my garden plan, go forward, is to work with self-seed. The South Seas “family” will be the largest effort. South Seas itself had self-seed again in our 2025 garden. If it germinates and goes to seedling this year, we should have blooms by 2028 – 2032 lol. It is slow to bloom, but the results are sooooo worth it.

Here are three examples. I will share more over the weeks to come.

While we Wait

While we wait for Spring to arrive, above is a pic of some of our oldest surviving Asian lilies in the garden. They bloom in June. They are fading each year, and I won’t replace them, but we enjoy what does bloom each year 🙂

The same day I took the pic of the Asian lilies (above), the first daylily of 2025 bloomed – Hello Yellow (below).

Hello Yellow is a mystery. It is from seedlings I planted from seed I harvested from our garden, but it does not match up with my (admittedly rookie at that time) documentation. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought it was a Stella de Oro volunteer, but I planted the seedlings myself, from our harvested seed, and I do not have any Stella de Oros in our townhouse gardens. Additionally, Stella de Oro is a diploid, and, based on how Hello Yellow is typing out with crosses that make pods that go to seed, Hello Yellow is a tetraploid. A very picky tetraploid, only making seed from a cross to one specific type of tetraploid, but failing to make seed from crosses from many diploids. Seed being the delineator. It does make pods from crosses from diploids, and they do well for sometimes quite a while, but eventually the diploid cross pods fail. To my great disappointment I might say, because if they did succeed, I would say Hello Yellow was a one in a million cross between what my rookie documentation said – a cross between a diploid and a tetraploid. But alas! Highly unlikely successful cross. And you can bet I have tried to replicate it. But nope. Hasn’t worked.

Compounding my attempts to resolve the mystery, a bunny and/or a squirrel ate the only Hello Yellow pods that were kind of making it in 2024. But there is hope – I have two seeds from the Hello Yellow crosses. We shall see. And you can bet Hello Yellow will get priority for the few crosses I do in 2026. Already in the plan.

Even if I cannot reproduce Hello Yellow, it will stay in the garden. It is quite unique – it is an extended bloom daylily (blooms in the evening and stays blooming until the next evening), and it is the longest blooming daylily in the garden. In 2025 it was the first daylily to bloom, and it also ended up being the last.

Enjoy!

Reassess

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At the end of January, after almost a year of significant health challenges, we lost our 15 1/2-year-old dog. We knew that outcome was coming, and we were pretty aware of how much we would miss him. But it has been hard. He was our constant sidekick, and that included in the gardens. He was also our last dog. We have had dogs for 30 years as a family, and we do rescue, so they often come from tough past care and experiences. We loved every dog, dearly, but it is time to wrap up that part of our life.

2025 year was a pivotal year in other ways as well, and we are assessing other things now too.

In 2025 I went a tad much on daylily crosses. It is a lot of creative fun to plan the crosses, to see what blooms each day and do the available crosses, to see the crosses form pods and mature to harvest readiness. But mid-September last year it switched to “too much”. Last year I harvested 521 seeds, with 19 successful intentional (not pollinator) cross types, 17 of which were new. There was a lot of harvest related work, including storage work that went way too far into fall for my preference. And now, in Spring, I have 521 seeds in dry cold stratification. (More on that below.) Every single one of those seeds will require planting, monitoring to seedling, hopefully making it to seedling, and then planting in its 3-year home (to bloom). I loved previous years when I did much less. Last year was too much. So, we reassess.

As part of the assessment, I considered that, yes, gardening is my primary hobby, but it is my – hobby. And true, I added garden blogging 8 years ago, and last year I added historical research, but those are also hobbies. To keep at that scope, I am solidifying my decision, for 2026, to pare way back on doing daylily crosses. I will probably do 5-7 intentional cross types, as I did in pre-2025 years, but I want to spend a boatload of time just enjoying the gardens, including watching the pollinators enjoy the gardens. From there we will see where it goes. I do want to head farther down the historic path of daylily gardening, and I am still working on getting Flava (historic) daylilies, but if I can’t get them this year, that’s ok too.

Now for actionable info – As I mentioned above. I do dry cold stratification for my harvested daylily seeds. Yes, I am seeing that is not the currently documented best practice, but again, I am a hobbyist, and I am aiming for minimal complexity. Here’s my timing this year. On Feb 7 I put the 521 harvested (stored by cross, type and date) daylily seeds, in envelopes, in plastic bags, into the side door of our refrigerator. Super high-tech stratification 😉 In April I will plant some seeds indoors in trays, just because in April I get impatient for garden activity. However, the vast majority of my harvested daylily seeds will get planted in May, in multiples, by type, into medium pots, and the medium pots will go into protected seedling boxes where they will “sink or swim” outside. I know. Blasphemy! But this is the method I arrived at quite a few years back, and how I do this every year. Last year I had about an 80% seed to seedling success ratio.

More to come. As always, I will share as we go along 🙂

A White Squirrel, Our Dog Having Fun, Very Full Hosta Garden, and Asian Lillies in Bud

For many years we have had white squirrels in our neighborhood. True albino. We even took pics in the beginning and sent them in to some sort of tracking site.

This pic dates back to Jan 9, 2019


And for our June in January pics today I have a few. The first is our dog mid-stride, front paw tucked, up north last June 9. WAY in the back is the outhouse. The lanterns mark the way at night 😉

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This next pic will not be a view we see again. It was the very full hosta garden under the linden on June 9, 2024. Mysteriously we lost 18 hostas between fall of 2024 and spring of 2025. We shall not focus on theories, but rather, enjoy the picture, and know that the empty spaces, where the hostas were, found new occupants in 2025.

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And this pic is quintessential early June (June 9, 2024) in our back townhome garden – the peach Asian lilies still in bud, a set of tulip leaves fading (one looks like it may have provided a bunny meal at one point – nothing left where the tulip bloom was), and I also remember that hosta, where a leaf looks a bit eaten, was actually from being stepped on and crushed. Stuff happens.

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Enjoy!

I hope you have a good evening!

Be Blessed!

A New Year

Hi All, and Happy 2026! I hope all is well! It has definitely been a bit since I posted, and I am looking forward to sharing again!

Let’s see – we left off at the gardens – townhome and historic cemetery – having wrapped up for 2025, and moving toward their winter sleep, as well as all the daylily seeds having been logged and stored until 2026 stratification. I was working on deciding if I was going to continue hybridizing daylilies in 2026, and in 2026 I was planning to head more towards daylilies that would have been around in early American gardens.

Throughout the rest of the fall, I enjoyed a very nice, long season with family and friends, old and new. Then, just about the time the snow started to fly, the holidays arrived. This holiday season I picked up an old hobby again and resolved a long-time research effort.

The first – picking up an old hobby again – was scrapbooking. Over the holidays I decided to start going through decades of holiday greeting cards I had saved. This was already a work-in-progress, but barely. I had previously sorted some cards by person/family into plastic sleeves in a large 3 ring binder. There was, however, also a box and a basket of cards that were part of my envisioned work. I got about sorting them, and from there, after a short detour where I considered and decided against configuring the binder by years, I settled on an approach. I realized I didn’t want an archive; I wanted the finished product to be more of a blessing. The project took on momentum. I needed it because, as you can probably imagine, yes, that approach involved purging some of the greetings. That is always a moment for pause. But from then on, the project itself became a blessing. I finished it between Christmas and New Years. And it has also already blessed others. Truly. Like my sweet husband asked me to bring it to our family Christmas celebration.

The second – resolving a long-time research effort – may be controversial. Here goes:

Every year as we approach the holidays I kind of cringe. Not only does the commercialism make me want to go on a no buy season, but I had also heard over 30 years ago, from my pastor, a Christian pastor, that Jesus was not born on December 24th, or 25th. My mind started. Why would we say He was? Give gifts that proport to represent that “Jesus is the Reason for the Season”? Over the years I have done boatloads of research and gone through various iterations of properly celebrating Christmas. You know, twisting and turning with stuff like “If 3 presents were enough for Jesus, then 3 presents each are enough for us”. I have been mindful to keep things properly focused. I spend a lot of time in reflection and prayer and gratitude. I spend time in fellowship. And of course we have family time. But – I like truth, so I kept searching. Because JESUS WAS BORN, and I do want to celebrate that.

This year I came to a peaceful decision that celebrating Jesus’s birth on Dec 24th/25th, although most likely not historically accurate, was reasonable, as it is quite likely that is around the time He was conceived. Not born like we know born, but when He became human. And that is why He came. For us. Humans. The rest of the weight of that truth I cannot just impart. It is a matter between God and each person to accept, or not. And I am not writing a research paper, I am sharing an experience, so I will not site references. Just like consuming any information, the best approach is to search it out yourself. I can, however, share. I would recommend keyword searching the statements below.

Jesus was conceived. Jesus was born. Jesus lived. Jesus was crucified for us. Jesus paid the price for our sins, so we do not have eternal separation from God. Jesus rose from the dead. Jesus ascended into heaven. Jesus waits for us to join Him at the appointed time.

So, after years of wrestling with the historical knowledge that Jesus most likely was not born on December 24th, this year I celebrated Jesus’s conception on Dec 24th/25th. And will in the future.

So those were two BIG highlights, for December.

On New Years Eve our family and friends prayed and prayed and prayed as a family member was given an incredibly precious gift from someone very far away. That gift is a crucial part of their ongoing physical healing journey, and we continue to pray and pray and pray. Prayers of thanks, and prayers for healing. God is good. God’s timing is perfect. God’s plan is not always our plan.

And now we are at January 7th. It is time to get back on the laptop and share some beauty.

The first pic is my finished, stuffed to the gills Christmas card binder. Next to a nostalgic magazine. The binder is FULL. Lots of love in there 🙂 And yes, I have some even older Christmas cards still in storage. The approach on those is TBD.

For 2026, besides trying to decide if I will continue to hybridize daylilies (or just see what the bees, and birds, and other insects and the wind accomplish), I have decided that if we as a culture can do “Christmas in July” (don’t get me started) I can do June in January. So, this is a pic from our slice of getaway in the land of coyotes and wolves and bears oh my 🙂 on June 7, 2025. Enjoy!

Be Blessed!

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One of my favorite fall looks

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Every year I save a few daylilies and hostas from the main cutback. Not many any more because, like I mentioned in my last post, I don’t like cutback with frozen fingers. 🥶

This year. I chose the ones in the pic above.

Is this not a wonderful fall daylily depiction? Wrapping up with their last bit of color 😊They just get fall-er and fall-er.

I think this pic deserves a print out 😊