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Happy Tuesday! I hope you are having a good week so far!

We are definitely in the march to Spring. Last Friday night we had a good ’ole thunderstorm. Early Saturday morning we had a snow globe snow fall. Saturday afternoon the snowfall was well on its way to melted, and by Sunday morning it was gone. The snowplow pile from the whole winter is just a shadow of what it was a few days ago. And although we will have cooler days mixed in, and even some snow, Winter 2025-2026’s time is coming to an end.

Saturday was the perfect time to knock out some remaining garden questions I was hoping to resolve.

Over the years I have saved a lot of info from older versions of the gardens, along with lots of daylily tags (dozens). Saturday as the snow swirled around, I pulled out those saved treasures and started to sort through them. By midafternoon, everything I no longer wanted to retain was in the trash, and I was researching my remaining daylily identification questions.

As I went along, I realized some pretty great patterns were already established in our gardens. Things I had been doing for years started coming forward as additional pieces of the future plan. First up, the daylily I have been calling “Red” is actually ‘Autumn Red’. I bought and planted them, oh, probably 20 years ago. The packaging is long gone, but at one time I did a search by pictures alone and pretty much figured that is what they are. Saturday afternoon, after I had excluded all other options from my saved tags and data, I went on a deep dive of online sources and finally made the call. Going forward “Red” shall be referred to as ‘Autumn Red’. The curled petal tips, the yellow mid-ribs, confirmed a diploid, confirmed pod and pollen fertile, bloom size and scape height match, along with mid-season, diurnal, and rebloom. And it looks exactly like the pictures. Exactly.

What caught me off guard, and was kind of a delightful find, is that ‘Autumn Red’ is quite old. It was registered in 1941. It is 85 years old this year. Not hundreds of years back, but ‘Autumn Red’ is definitely not a modern hybrid. And, I am already a few years into hybridizing with ‘Autumn Red’, with 5 successful crosses to seed, as both pod and pollen parent in 2025, and a set of seedlings from a 2024 cross with ‘Autumn Red’ that I planted in our gardens last year. Now we wait to see those blooms.

I did those crosses on a whim a few years ago, proving out ploidy. That work turned into a pattern, and now it looks like hybridization with ‘Autumn Red’ is going to be the only path. Self-seed is most likely not a go. It is stingy on producing self-seed and I do not have any “Autumn Red’ self-seed that has gone to seedling. It does reestablish well from division, and I even have a note that I re-planted a single fan. I forgot about that, but it kept on doing its daylily stuff, and it bloomed last year. It seems “Autumn Red’ is great at making seed from intentional crosses and great at going to seedling from that seed if I stratify, bring the germinated seeds to seedling, and plant those seedlings into the ground in late summer. And so, that will be the ‘Autumn Red’ daylily scope.

Unfortunately, with that. I am now back to working to bring all of the ‘Autumn Red’ seeds to seedling before they go up north. Maybe I should dedicate the little 6-cell greenhouse trays I just bought to the “Autumn Red’ seeds. More likely, though, I will plant 20 same cross seeds per medium pot and whatever goes to seedling will go up north – minus a small sample for here.

As for additional results of culling through all that old daylily data, I realized “Unidentified Yellow Freebie” is most likely the ‘Schnickel Fritz’ I bought in 2020, and quickly planted, amidst a lot of other activity in our life at that time. Unfortunately, it is not at all what I was looking for, and also unfortunately, it did poorly last year. I think it is failing in its current location. Poor ‘Schnickel Fritz’ may say goodbye. I wish I had that money back lol.

As for “Peach”, I saved packaging from ‘Romantic Rose’, and that may be a match, but although ‘Romantic Rose’ meets a lot of the criteria of “Peach”, “Peach” is quite a bit lighter in color. That can happen, but I am not quite ready to make that call. We’ll see what the color looks like this year.

And, also unfortunately, Hello Yellow’s parentage will continue to remain a mystery. I definitely planted those seeds. I just have not been able to replicate it from my less than stellar retained data. But Hello Yellow stays. For sure. If need be, it can just be its pretty self.

20,000 foot view – We learn as we go. I have shipping lists and a plethora of tags that reflect my exuberant anticipation of a delightful daylily garden. And I got it. I just didn’t initially realize the documentation needs for the scope of the auxiliary hobby that evolved. Hybridizing daylilies definitely crept up on me. And daylilies plopped into the ground are great for enjoying. Not so great when life was super busy when you planted them, and your notes were hasty and sketchy.

I hope these shares are helpful, or at least fun to read 🙂

In the meantime, I am now only allowing myself 4 (not 5-7) new crosses in 2026 – until I get the scope of this daylily hybridizing thing stabilized. You guessed it – all of the new crosses this year will be with South Seas self-seed blooms. So, no new ‘Autumn Red’ crosses. And, in fact, no new diploid crosses at all.

I hope you have a good week!

Be Blessed 🙂

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!

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

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 🙂

Hard Frost, Garden Cutback, Decision on daylily scope

Well … the gardens are done for the year. I knew it was coming. Our DIL had the end of their harvest up north, and I knew our second hard frost was coming here.

It did. Late last week we dipped to 28F.

The next morning, I saw the frost. I watched as the trees rained leaves. I enjoyed the beauty, the crisp air … and eventually I started at the cutback work. I have a 60 degree-ish high temperature threshold for the cutback timing. When I see the extended forecast high temperatures start to dip below that, it is time. A little can remain, things that aren’t quite ready, but it is not my favorite thing to cut the gardens back with freezing fingers. So with that, I hit it hard.

It’s a bummer that we are done for 2025.

At the same time, however, there is a “happy” bubbling up. My winter activities ideas list is full – enough that I have a comfort level I will have both fun and challenging things to keep me good. And I have started to bring out the hygge for the next six months. The (battery operated) window candles with timers are up, the few strong scented (windows open) candles are being replaced with my favorite white unscented candles, and we have already enjoyed the gentle scent of few rauchers (German incense “smokers”). Bratapfelduft (baked apple) is my personal favorite.

I have also made a pivotal daylily scope decision. I reached out to a provider of the 1762 daylily I want, and they ship in late April/May. I am adding that daylily in 2026 and starting to pivot toward the intersection of historical with my daylilies. This will be a significant change in my daylily work. I think it will be a fun challenge.

To be fully transparent, this decision all started this year with falling in love with a number of daylilies I grew from self-seed to flowering. I loved their form and simplicity. I seriously started to wonder what might happen if I ditched all the busy-ness of hybrid crossing and noting and tracking and giving up early fall freedom due to late harvesting. What would happen if I went back to just letting the pollinators and the wind and the daylilies anatomical tendencies create seeds? I analyzed my spreadsheet for exactly what space my 2025 hybridized seedlings will need in 2026 and what the 2025 seeds would need as 2026 seedlings. A LOT! I listened while my family started to call the cabin up north the hunting shack. (By now I was grumpy.) My idea of a daylily “farm” up north was fading. And I saw the tide turn. What exactly was I doing expanding my daylily work so exponentially? I was already pretty sure I didn’t want to do farmer’s markets to sell my excess plants. I knew for sure I didn’t want to ship stuff around. And the fam was increasingly sending “not really that interested in the daylily farm idea, but hey, if you want to do it, good luck” vibes. 😉 Love them!
My conclusion – my life could be so much simpler!

I slowly, and yes sadly, and sometimes crankily (is that a word?), but rationally assessed the scope of daylily hobby work I LIKE to do, year-round, and I decided – “2026 goes to a historic daylily focus” – researching, gardening, and planning included.

Now, I am not trashing the work I have already started. I think that will be fun to see unfold. These things take years. The 2025 seeds, if they germinate, if they go to full seedling, if they survive the first winter, will, at earliest, here in Minnesota USA, bloom for the first time in 2027, probably longer. But I am shaping, refining, what I already have as I weave things together between the seasons and our reality. I am part of a family. And in a marriage. And hobby daylilies were starting to suck planned time and create problems. Not cool. No desire to repeat.

So that’s it. That’s why I’ve been quiet. I was enjoying early fall after the extended seed harvest debacle pushed our fall plans way too close to our family’s hunting season. I was delaying the garden cutback. And I was ultimately deciding how to move forward with the daylilies.

Here’s some fun cloud pictures to words.
I was figuring out how to work with the volcano, ‘er fountain 😉

and I was deciding what needed to move out.

So Where Did We Land?

I have now had time to sit with the data on the 2025 daylily crosses. I am a bit shocked, but not totally. I harvested 422 seeds from our gardens here. 277 seeds are from diploids. That is not surprising, as I know what Pink Tirza does. There is a reason Pink Tirza is my diploid line. This year Pink Tirza was an incredible pod parent. Last year it was the opposite – Pink Tirzah was our top pollen producer in 2024. Naomi Ruth and Pink Tirzah don’t do fantastically well together, but Naomi Ruth was a top pollen producer this year, as well. Peach also typed out as a diploid (which did surprise me – a lot), and we have seeds from Peach. And with the Red daylilies in the mix and at an overwhelming quantity of 8 clumps, red boosted the diploid numbers.

Then there are 111 tetraploid seeds. Not surprisingly, South Seas took the prize for tetraploids. South Seas is my tetraploid line for a reason. South Seas is a powerhouse. And Coral Majority, one of her children (which I did not know when I purchased Coral Majority, but bonus!) continues to amaze. In fact, South Seas may have daylily grandbabies in the next few years in our garden due to Coral Majority. Fingers crossed. We have seed. It would be kind of cool. We shall see.

And then we have 34 self-seed from our gardens. Mostly – South Seas and Coral Majority, but a few Red and Just Plum Happy.

Not in the above numbers are 99 seeds harvested from Oakwood – 78 of which are Stella De Oro and look kind of iffy, but maybe they will do something for those gardens. I will try. There are 2 Red Volunteer seeds I harvested from a Red Volunteer I planted there last fall, and then 17 seeds from some new daylilies I don’t remember from last year, but they did very well this year.

So – 521 seeds. Oof! Yah. But I have my thinking cap on. I will figure it out. Lots of other people do this, at a much bigger scale. We shall be creative. There are 4 large success crosses. The rest can go in little seedling pots. Maybe direct sow the self-seed.

Definitely scaling back next year. Oy!

Back in the Saddle – A New Daydream Begins

All the daylily pods are harvested and there are just a few still drying. With that, I am back in one of my happy places, cleaning data on the tracking spreadsheet, creating pivot tables, slicing and dicing the data. I have a pretty good idea of the top performers – pollen and pod, diploid and tetraploid, and also what I was able to replicate, at least to seed again, from previous years crosses. Soon the 2025 seeds will all go to storage until next March when I set them for stratification.

And it occurs to me, yes, I am definitely back in my happy place. It is full of some things I have loved for years, but it includes an expansion. It includes a new happy place I created last year when I embarked on the Mahala Felton historical research. And so my new “normal” thinking was at work when I began a new search a few days – wondering about daylily history, and specifically what type of daylilies might have been around during the historical times I have been researching. A little AI inquiry ensued, and the results were confirmed. Daylily ‘Apricot’ was the first recorded daylily hybrid, in 1893. And on it went as I was fully in daylily research mode. ‘Apricot’ was the first recorded hybrid 133 years ago, with parentage in still available ‘Flava’. Flava’s origin is listed with a registration date of 1762, and that is probably about as far back as I will get, as the registrar was none other than Carolus Linnaeus, the Father of Taxonomy.

So, fun fact, ‘Flava’ was probably grown in homesteads around this area when it was being settled, but ‘Flava’s child, ‘Apricot’, would not have been in Mahala Felton’s garden, as it was registered the year after she passed, by a school teacher, George Yeld, in England.

Next, my mind went to possibly owning a ‘Flava’ daylily. ‘Flava’ (Hemerocallis lilioasphodelus) looks so sweet and is supposed to be lemon fragrant. Who wouldn’t like that? What would self-seed look like? Would it even go to seedling? Would seedlings ever bloom? And what could I do with that?

‘Apricot’, when researched, makes quite a family tree. I could get lost. I probably will at some point lol. History x Daylilies? Yeah. I will find myself hours later, emerging to find my tea is cold and I need to rest my eyes.

I see the best chance of getting a ‘Flava’ is spring. That means I have all fall and winter to research and dream. And anything I would do would be years out for results anyways. But it is a line I think would be worth at least investigating. It is a diploid, and although Pink Tirza is my diploid line, I could have a “historical line”. Right? Could I rein in to self-seed only and make room for that? It is an intriguing thought.

For now, I leave you with pictures of the last three seed pods, pulled a bit early probably, due to circumstances, but still hovering around 60 days maturity. They should be OK, and if not, they are duplicates of others that did fully mature.

update time

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.

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