We have a number of what I call “bouquets” in the townhome gardens. These evolved over the years, initially accidentally, due to small daylily fans or asian lily pieces or hosta corms accidentally being left in place and then rebuilding slowly over the years. This is one of my favorites – a hosta that initially came to our gardens from a tiny corm my Dad left out to sweep up at his place after dividing and moving his hostas almost two decades ago, a set of Asian lilies from some of our initial plantings, and an Autumn Red daylily fan that escaped digging out years ago when we divided them and brought them out front. Today they tell a story of a loved garden with a history. It is another moment when I remember, I can buy things at stores, but these have wonderful memories.
There are others, and I will share over the next months 🙂
Last year I was in a very transitional year. As part of that, my mind was full of new thoughts regarding the gardens. And yet … my mind was particularly quiet when enjoying a specific palate – peach and salmon and coral and melon. Pink, yes. Purple, yes. Cream, yes. Red as waves of landscaping out front. But something about that melon, peach, salmon, coral look was most peaceful. I saw it in the self-seed blooms from South Seed. It made my decision on what I would work with for crosses this year. Just Right.
This morning I was reflecting on how very much the gardens have come into themselves. And how much I did last year that I am seeing come together this year. And how little there is to do now that the plethora of seeds that resulted from my exceptionally active and creative mind last year are all planted. The gardens are Just Right.
And, quietly, I am wondering – did that big harvest of red pollen parent seeds that only produced one seedling – lol – turn out that way because, for me, one red pollen parent seedling this year will be Just Right?
Right now, the daylily seedlings from prior years are abundant, like wrapped presents, beautiful before the full “gift” is revealed. And the hostas and sedum and even the tiny amount of forget-me-nots I allowed to remain last year are Just Right as accents.
Absolutely true that my gardens are not static. Ideas are abundant. But the peaceful place is worth preserving, at least in large part. I think that is where the gardens have landed. Just Right, but open to a few exceptional additions.
Finally, it does occur to me that sharing will remain as a part of this new Just Right. As always, in pictures and in thoughts, but I am guessing this Just Right will continue to have bandwidth for dedicated results. And that seems very good to me as well.
This is what Sandy’s Corner looks like right now. I will continue to share that garden as the weeks go on 😊
Today I finished planting the 2025 harvested daylily seeds. It was so incredibly satisfying to refresh my pivot table after entering today’s accomplishments and see … no lines left. Hooray!!! It was an experience. A shall not be repeated experience. Way, way, way too much “fun”. But everything is accounted for and reconciled. Now we wait to see what nature does.
First fun story – After planting all the daylily seeds, I realized I have four labels/tags left. They were from a very welcome discovery today. I thought I was out of labels. And I was not going to buy anything more for the 2025 harvested seeds. I was cutting up the flat side of the plastic trays from the 4 pks of cream cheese danish, cutting strips, and using that for labels! So today, after finding the forgotten stack of labels, and using them, there were four left. A confirmation to stick with the “only four” crosses I have planned this year? I think so 😉
Second fun story – About 1/2 hour after I finished planting the rest of the daylily seeds and had put away all the supplies, we were sitting outside relaxing. In hummed … the first hummingbird to visit this year! It looked big and healthy. It hummed in, looked around, and hummed back out. It is May! The hummingbirds are back! You can bet the first of the feeders has food cooling down right now and will go out shortly.
And for beauty – The gardens look awesome. They are filling out so nicely. It should be a few more weeks and the Asian lilies will start to bud out. And the clematis out back are starting to vine so they should have blooms to share in a few weeks.
Time now for patio time – for long morning coffees, or a beverage of choice in the afternoon. Just sitting, chatting with neighbors, and relaxing as much as a gardener can. We can. With some occasional “let me check one thing” moments 😉
I leave you with another picture of one of the white squirrels, from this morning.
We are at the end of April now, and what a difference the last week has made!
Sandy’s Corner is really filling out.
The daylilies look great.
Last year’s seedlings are much farther along than in previous years when I was still working at finding out what they liked best.
The hostas are even looking much fuller this year.
And our volunteer shrub does indeed look like a currant. It can stay, at least for now. The birds will probably love it.
On the flip side, I could kick myself for buying those tiny little 6 cell seed planting setups. They definitely fit perfectly into the grey seedling boxes, but the seeds are not germinating like they do when I plant medium pots of up to 20 “same” seeds together. I think I know someone who might appreciate them for starting veggie seeds next year 😉
Overall, I am finding that I really like what I have going on in the townhome gardens this year. It has been fun to see the new look and focus come up, and I am more convinced than ever that scaling way back on the crosses this year is the right plan. I can always scope up if I want to, but I am definitely not enjoying that I have so much work yet to go on getting last year’s seeds going. A lighter scope next year continues to sound fabulous.
The historic cemetery gardens are really filling out as well.
This past weekend my husband and I went over and did some spring cleanup at the historic cemetery gardens. They are really looking good! I do suspect our phantom weeders have been helping as well, because I kind of remember it being a little messier a week or so ago. So, thanks to them!
There is one sad thing. Over the past couple years, I have added purchased bare root daylilies to the historic cemetery gardens, as well as added seedlings from crosses I did at the townhome gardens. When I walked though a week or so ago, it looked like they were not there. This past weekend that was confirmed. There are moles or gophers over there, but the markers are almost all missing too, so that is odd. At any rate, I do have the seeds I harvested from there last fall, and I will direct sow those to do one final try with seeds and seedlings, but I think I have my answer. Bare root planting is a no go there. And probably seed and seedling planting as well.
On the upside, the daylily from South Seas self-seed that I planted at the historic cemetery last fall is thriving, so additions like that may be an option, go forward.
This morning the forecast said rain. I was sincerely hoping it would hold, as the first wave of seeds are now going outside and some natural watering is always a bonus.
I was not disappointed.
The seedling boxes
Starting seeds indoors this year reminded me of why I don’t do that. It was sooo time for them to go outside.
Sandy’s Corner
Sandy’s corner
The gardens are missing one little chihuahua terrier this spring and that is definitely sad for us. It is a little extra poignant because Sandy was our last dog. We have decided after 30 years of being rescue dog owners that it is time for that chapter to end. A new chapter is upon us, but our memories of Sandy’s long life with us remain.
We have such wonderful memories of Sandy in the gardens. Specifically, “Sandy’s Corner” is where he liked to sunbathe – on the path, on the grass right outside the garden, or, in his later years, in a dog bed outside the garden on the patio.
That garden area has also changed a lot over the years with the Linden growing and casting different shade patterns. And it is where our successive Traeger shadow has grown.
The area closest to the house gets the least amount of morning sun, and I used to, many years ago, have big hostas back there. Gradually over the years I moved those big hostas out and did more with tulips. But tulips around here only bloom a few years, and then they just come up as greens each year. Nowadays the tulip greens are primarily early season bunny food.
When I want to reclaim a space with tulip greens, I simply dig them out. Such will be the case with the tulip greens in Sandy’s Corner this year. I know the hostas work in that area, and I have a large hosta I need to move. It will be a nice backdrop to the daylily seedlings that do exceptionally well with the longer sun exposure farther out.
And the little garden accents, as whimsical as they are, will also move out soon. Their short-term job is to remind me not to put anything there. That is the corridor to the hummingbird feeder, and, for that reason, last fall I removed some daylily seedlings from that area. My husband maintains the hummingbird feeders – that we both love to watch, and which should not cause “fear of stepping on daylily seedlings” stress 😉 And no worries, the seedlings I moved are doing very well in their new location.
This sweet tulip is in another area, and it will stay. Hopefully the bunnies leave it alone 🙂
One of two tulip buds this Spring
One spot that will not change is this corner. This is the corner in which Sandy most often sat on the path. There used to be hostas there, but when they began to fail, we moved them, and I reclaimed the space for daylily seedlings. Those daylily seedlings bloomed last year and are back stronger than ever this year (way more fans). They are in the right exposure.
There are also forget-me-nots in that area. I like a smattering of those, but not a mat. Last year I began selectively weeding those out after they bloomed (not letting them go to seed). A little seed is the perfect amount.
I will never tire of this. Daylilies coming up in SpringA close up
And with that, it is Friday, and I am ready to relax. My husband tells me he is going to make his signature smoked nachos on the grill. My stomach is already growling 🙂
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 😉
Screenshot
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.
Screenshot
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.
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.
The past few day I have finally felt like I have entered the land of fall in Minnesota. It has been a while coming. And there is a reason. But first –
The 2025 gardening season started out a bit tough, but ended very well – in a significantly different direction.
Earlier this year I shared that we lost 18 hostas sometime between last fall when I cut them back and when they should have been up this spring. Some were huge and all were very healthy the previous year (2023). In fact, I had offered two in particular to my Dad, and he was excited to get them. It was a bit disconcerting to have them vanish.
We have had a full spring/summer now to watch for any sign of the hostas to return. What can I surmise? The vast majority are gone. We will probably never know for sure what happened, but they are definitely gone. There was one that did somewhat recover. And there were two that sent up baby leaves that have endured. The consolation was they were from the ones I was planning to bring to my Dad. So that’s good.
The hosta losses were sad, but the daylilies were crazy good this year, both in bud and flower production, and in pod success. There are quite a few seed pods from self-seed but the vast majority are from crosses I did – hybridization. My tracking spreadsheet tells me I was successful in getting 21 different cross types to seed pod. That is a lot. And I have been feeling it all of September. I have come to the conclusion that the scope of what I did this year is not where I want to land next year. Here’s why:
I absolutely love daylily season. Head over heals, in my very happy place. But I also really love late summer and early fall in Minnesota. I like freedom to enjoy it outdoors. I don’t want to be spending a lot of time sitting indoors during that time, documenting daylily info and storing seeds, and I try to plan for that preference. Knowing that, and suspecting I had gone a bit far with making daylily crosses by mid-July, I made a conscious decision to stop doing crosses on the last day of July. I knew I already had a lot of pods, and that very few were failing, so I knew I would be busy, but I don’t think I fully understood the implications. On September 28, I am still harvesting, labelling, documenting, and storing seeds. And here is the twist – I have discovered it is not my favorite of favorite activities at the scope at which I am now doing daylily crosses. Additionally, based on what I have read over the past year, left to my own very curious and daylily loving devices, the work will only mushroom from here. Think exponential since I literally have already produced hundreds of daylily seedlings and if even 50% of the seeds I am harvesting this season go to seedling, I will be in a sea of daylilies. And 50% is not unrealistic. My success ratio from 2024 seeds to 2025 seedlings was much higher than 50%.
I have thought about this situation ad infinitum. I have even hinted at some ideas in my posts. The most appealing option to me at this point is to take 2026 as a self-seed only year. So let’s get the self-seed discussion out of the way first. I could harvest daylily self-seed for the rest of my life and still keep my fall seasons free for anything I want to do. Yahoo! Self-seed harvesting is very easy. There is no documenting until I harvest. I just enjoy the progression – the scapes to buds to gorgeous blooms. I watch the pollinators come to visit and imagine the wonderful work they are doing. The wind blows, different daylilies make their own crosses easily… There are lots of factors at work. None require anything but admiration from me. No planning, no overheating my brain with what pollen fertile daylilies are blooming that day that could be crosses with compatible pod fertile daylilies that are blooming that day. No documenting endlessly, first on my notes on my phone and then into a spreadsheet with 13 columns of data. The pollinators or the wind or whatever, do their thing, I see what pods mature, collect the seed, put them in an envelope marked xyz daylily breed-year, and I’m done. Maybe I add the count (how many seeds from that daylily type) to refresh my mind when I put them in the refrigerator to stratify and start planning for planting. I keep some and I plant some in other gardens. However, I do not have a say in what goes into that seed. But, so far, I have been delighted.
Hybridizing is a lot more work. A lot. I’m not talking just doing the crosses. Oh no! There is documenting, documenting, documenting from that point on, and then more documenting and labelling for storage. And even crosses of the exact same pollen to the exact same breed of daylily on the exact same day in the exact same bunch (just different blooms) can mature on very different days. Sometimes a week apart, sometimes more. And then when I do 8 identical crosses on one day, 6 on another, four on another, oh yah. The spreadsheet gets longer and longer with more and more of those red corner notes, where I try to put into words something that will make sense six months from now, when I have a question on what I harvested. I am not teasing when I say all that collecting and documenting and storing ate up a lot of my freedom in September. (I made 21 different crosses this year with multiple pods each.). But if I don’t do that documentation work, I get the mysterious “maybe” cross between Pink Tirza (a diploid) and Marque Moon (a tetraploid) that created something that looks pretty close to a Stella De Oro. And I, on purpose, do not have any Stella De Oros here, so … What’s worse, I can’t duplicate it and my other suspected crosses for that outcome produced no pods. Soooo. Document I do. For Hybridizing.
So, where have I landed? I have come to the conclusion that unless I go for a scope where I am selling what I produce, hybridizing is interesting work in small batches, but “not for me” at the scope I expanded to this year.
I know. Sad. But I will still do a few intentional (hybrid) crosses each year. Just at a much smaller scale. The scale I have enjoyed in previous years. And I still will have all the daylilies created up to this point. I just need to stop the mushroom effect.
The other option is to start a real daylily farm, like a business. And then I would be sitting at farmers markets, because I am not going to start mailing things around. The fact is, I am a gardener, not a marketer 😉
One thing is for certain, spreadsheet documentation is worth continuing:
Since I am keeping a spreadsheet for all of this documenting, and the beauty of spreadsheets is you can slice and dice data a lot of ways, eventually optimal options will start to come forward. Without adding new daylily breeds to my garden, there is a finite amount of crosses – diploid to diploid, tetraploid to tetraploid, early, mid, late season. I also have a certain palate I am looking for so that narrows things, which is helpful. Where I could get in trouble is the infinite number of crosses with new seedlings that bloom. That is where I will need to discipline myself.
So back to the start of the blog. The past few days I pulled myself together, and I allowed myself to get into “I am going to enjoy fall” mode. I spent a huge chunk of the days outside. I did some garden cutback, and I did some fall projects. I even took an old bird feeder and made a lantern using a battery operated votive. And I harvested the 6th to last daylily pod yesterday. The others have to be harvested by Sept 30th because the furnace and AC annual maintenance person is coming that day, and they will need the space where the pods are still maturing to be clear. It will be tight. Those pods may be a loss. No, I will not reschedule the maintenance appointment to save 5 daylily pods. I know. Sad.
For today’s pics, I cut my “landscaping” daylilies back yesterday. They were dying back, and they were obscuring the Autumn Joy sedum. Can’t have that.
Before
After
Oh, there you are beautiful Autumn Joy sedum! That I can propagate in weeks with cuttings and no documentation whatsoever. And have. A lot 🙂
It took a bit today to finally get this blog decided on. There was “Envelope, Please” where I started to share about harvesting the daylily seeds, what was looking good for next year’s potential. There was “Very little left to do in the townhome gardens” where I had started to share the pre-fall progression for the gardens over the past couple weeks. There was “A snapshot of this ‘n that” where I had some pretty things in the gardens to share. All of those were started in the past few weeks and then left to sit. Our aging dog with a heart condition took a few continual turns for the worse, a family member got a very tough medical diagnosis, and the US and world news is … horrifying. Maybe things like this continually happen and we just don’t get a view to it. But it has all been heartbreaking. Praying about it continually, and then doing positive things has been the only way. Our dog is now on medicine designed purely to make his life as comfortable as possible. Our family member is undergoing extensive treatment. And the world, and us in the world, continually mourns losses, but most certainly with the hope of peace for eternity.
And we are still in this world, so we have work to do. And work we will do. Sharing beauty with the gifts we have been given. And experience. And wisdom. And sometimes, as other bloggers have reminded me today, just good old belly laughs. In proper time and measure.
So, for today, I will share a lot of thanks and praise. And some experience, and, hopefully, wisdom.
At the townhouse:
The daylily seed harvest is plentiful. Hundreds of seeds. Some self-seed, but even more through intentional crosses. I have no idea what I will do if even half of it germinates. But I’m guessing I will figure it out.
I have finished all my transplanting, and I am truly truly truly out of room. Some stuff will have to go elsewhere with next year’s divisions. I keep thinking up north but maybe something else will come to mind. We shall see.
The townhome gardens are winding down. The sedum is in full bloom. The late blooming hostas look awesome, and soon I will start cutting the daylilies back (but that will definitely be a different blog post :))
At the historic cemetery:
The self-seed I harvested in the “Shirley” and the “Mahala” gardens – 78 Stella de Oro seeds plus the 2 Red Volunteer seeds – if they germinate in spring, will need a home over there. Possibly at the Fischer site.
The Fischer site test garden is started and, so far, is doing well.
Yes, we have lost Mahala daylily seedlings in the “Mahala” garden. Yes, I am sad about that. Yes, I knew it could happen. No, I will not replace them. What did Grandma say? “Ve get too soon oldt and too late schmart.” Which leads me to –
The historic cemetery gardens are ending their third year in their renovated state and I could not be (much) more pleased. Yes, I wish the Mahala daylily seedling situation was a bit better. Yes, there have been some other challenges. But I have learned soooooooooo much about things that are unique to public site gardens. WAY more joy than “ugghhh”. AND – those gardens are now fully in maintenance mode. Self-sustaining for stock through division of existing plants and seed harvesting propagation from the site itself, and only doing self-seed, no intentional crosses there. It is fully self-sustainable with one exception –
It will need mulch topper each spring, but that should be the only spend 🙂
This is a HUGE milestone. I am very excited about that – the joint accomplishment and the ability to confidently call that decision.
And now we can do extras, like the Fischer site, as the ideas and resources present themselves. We truly do have an awesome team vibe established for those types of things 🙂
So today I am not going to endlessly sit in front of our tv watching horrifying things, dotted with advertisements for things I do not need nor want. I am not going to worry about things I cannot do anything more about. I can choose to use that time for more beautiful things, and still know enough to know how to pray, and for what. And that is what I shall do.
Susan's Daily Garden 