Tag: Spring

Lessons Learned from 2025 Daylily Crossing Season

My 2025 daylily crossing (hybridizing) work is done, and pods are formed and maturing. I have had a week to relax and just enjoy the bloom finale, and some lessons learned are coming to mind. I thought I’d share. Here goes:

1) The journey is exponential. I have gone from harvesting self-seed from one South Seas daylily 7 years ago to now well over 100 intentional and self-seed seedlings. I have seedlings at the townhouse and at the historic cemetery, and have planted seedlings in other gardens as well, including our little house up north that we sold. In addition, this year I have dozens of successful intentional crosses that have gone to pod. Pods often have multiple seeds, so hundreds more seedlings are potentially on the way next year. To move to the next step, some of the 2025 seedlings are moving up north this fall. Those are the 2024 seeds that went to seedling this season.


2) Crosses that worked one year may not work the next. Crosses to the red daylilies were crazy successful last year. This year? Very skimpy. And believe me, I tried. But new ideas abound, and even just flipping the cross, pollen to pod parent, works.


3) Daylilies I want to use a lot for crosses need to be very accessible. I love paths, but I do not love stepping through daylilies on a forget-me-not path. a) Forget-me-Nots stick to fabric, and b) it just feels wrong to step on flowers. As an example, this is Coral Majority. Although she is not a good pod parent for intentional crosses, her pollen is awesome. But she is not in a good accessibility spot right now. Eventually I need to move her to a more accessible spot. Probably next fall.

I have done crosses with her pollen this year, and she also has some self-seed pods again this year. I am, however, more often than not, just enjoying her blooms. She has had quite a few more tame (not so wild tie-died looking) blooms in the past few weeks. Isn’t she looking exceptionally lovely? I will miss her blooms.

4) Only cross one daylily type’s pollen to one clump of daylilies. This year I took that even farther for some crosses and only did one pollen type cross to all of the Marque Moon blooms, all on the same day, and I got 4 pods. Semi-Simplistic. Who wants to make a fun hobby stressful? Not me!

5) Take time to smell the daylilies – literally and figuratively. Some daylilies, like Tender Love (below), are very nicely fragrant, so don’t ignore that treat.

And figuratively, when doing crosses starts to feel like burn-out, stop. The pods will require work yet this season – harvesting, labeling, storing – and then the seeds all need to be stratified, and planted and cared for to germination and growth next year. No shame in setting a date to stop. Name a date and then stick to it.

6) Remember this is a very long game. Years. Maybe more than half a decade. Unless you are willing to pitch greens after just a few years, be patient. I had a six-year-old seedling finally go to bloom this year and it was well worth the wait.

7) There is landscaping, and there is gardening. For “landscaping” be willing to stick to a mass quantity palate. I have a red, white, and blue theme for the landscaping out front with masses of red daylilies – very simple.

8) Gardens are not landscaping. I have gardens out back. In gardens, especially daylily crossing gardens, color surprises happen. Wonderful surprises. And ”not for here” surprises. This year one of the surprises was a red daylily volunteer from the red daylilies out front.

They used to be out back, and I think a seed got in with the Purple D’Oro seedlings I moved, right into my line of view where I sit on the patio. Right next to Equal Opportunity, which turned out to be a peachy, frilly bloom I wish I had 10 of. But Equal Opportunity is done blooming now, and you know what? The red volunteer just keeps blooming away. I love the masses of red out front AND I love the calm of pastels out back. I came to the conclusion that the red daylily seedling will be moving, but probably not until next fall. I am still hoping there are Purple D’Oro seedlings to come in that bunch.

9). Focus, Focus, Focus. Pick one or two lines for crosses (parentage), and work with that. South Seas is already, for sure, my primary. Pink Tirzah will probably be a secondary. Even though I can’t find Pink Tirzah’s parentage, I already have seedlings and pods from Pink Tirzah, so I know that line will also work.

10) Document, Document, Document. And document some more. My sad, sad story on that is that I am beginning to think I have a cross I mis-labeled in the early years. It went to bloom a couple years ago. I had it labeled as a cross between a diploid and a tetraploid, which I might actually have done back then. Or it could be a self-seed. Or it could have been a tetraploid cross where I wrote Pink Tirzah instead of Pink China Doll. It has fairly driven me bonkers! Especially since it has typed out two years in a row as a tetraploid and Pink Tirzah is supposed to be a diploid – but, then again, I found reports of it crossing with a tetraploid. Since this is such a long game, testing out for replication will take years. In the meantime, Hello Yellow is a nocturnal tetraploid that took a cross with two different tetraploids this year and made pods. And in the end, I am doing this for fun. Hello Yellow may forever remain a beautiful mystery.

11) Enjoy self-seeds. I have fallen in love with the self-seeds that went to bloom in our garden this year. They all will stay. I may even do an “only self-seed” year in the future. You never know.

So there you have it. 10 Lessons Learned from the 2025 intentional daylily crossing work I did, plus an extra option for “no intentional cross required” (the self-seeds).

I hope you have a wonderful weekend, and Happy Gardening!



Pivot

Today is my cutoff day for doing daylily crosses. I am, admittedly, a little bit sad, but I know it is a good decision. I don’t want to overwork the daylilies with pods, I am fatigued myself on all the planning and crossing and documenting, and I want to have a fall, too. If I stop now, all the pods should be through the maturity window by the time I want to stop watching for pods that are opening.

So today is it. I had all the crosses done by 10am, and now I watch and wait.

Although I do shudder a bit at the volume of crosses I have done this year, I have lots of good notes and lots of all types of pics. I also have been very pleased with the new seedling planters. I am set up with space for seeds that go to seedling next year, plus ways to protect the seedlings.

I am also reminding myself this is not the end of daylily bloom season, just the end of the crossing season. In fact, the late daylilies are not even at peak. I do, however, have all the crosses I want on those as well. So now I get to enjoy. Just enjoy. And get my creative mind going again on my fall list. What needs to be divided, what needs to go to a new location, what worked with the seedling boxes and what next year will pivot to on that setup.

I am also reminding myself this has been is a big change year for me. This hobby is now solidly very deliberate. I don’t random buy anymore. I don’t walk garden stores, seeing what they have chosen to stock. I like to see what is available through hybridizers and propagators, but I seriously consider things I did not before – timing, color compatibility, height, pollen and pod fertility, ploidy, parentage … It is still super fun, but with a specific focus I did not include before.

What happens next, yet this year? Divisions and transplanting work starts tomorrow. Not of the daylilies with pods, but of seedlings that need to come out of pots and go into the ground, and of hostas that need to be relocated. I am also looking at making sure I have paths for next year’s accessibility. If it is too hard to get to something I won’t use it for crosses. Totally OK, but again, needs to be intentional.

So tomorrow turns the corner to all that. I will continue to share as I go.

Happy wishes to you for good garden time until then!


Marque Moon bloomed yesterday

Marque Moon bloomed yesterday for the first time this season. She is, as always, absolutely beautiful this year.

Marque Moon has been in our garden for a very long time, so planning crosses with her is pretty easy. I had a number of crosses queued up waiting for her bloom and have done quite a few of those yesterday and today. There are just a few left, pending specific bloom, and then all of the crosses for the year will be done, at least once.

With Marque Moon’s bloom, we move farther into the time where I stop doing crosses for the season, and just enjoy the gardens. It gets to a point with crosses, as a hobbyist, and with the heat and air conditions that we have, where not only the daylilies wind down, but I myself begin to wind down. First, I start to want a day just enjoying the blooms, but then eventually I get to the point where I realize that “we’re good” with crosses. That’s where I am. Just a few more days to go.

Remember, by now I have done the crosses at least once, with many much more, and now we are at the volume stage. In deciding when to wrap up, I consider not over-stressing pod parents, how much I could reasonably plant and house next year if the crosses I have done would all go to seed maturity, and the pod maturity window. Then I set a date for myself when I will stop doing crosses. For me, this year, that date will be July 31. I am feeling it. Time to be done. Not with the daylilies, of course, but with crosses. And, of course, if we get self-seeds, I will let those stay.

A lot of work goes into more serious work on the crosses, a lot of documentation and tracking and planning and research. I am already considering scope for next year. I really enjoyed all the beautiful self-seeds this year, and they will be a part of the plan go forward. Maybe a bigger part than deliberate crosses. I am still considering.

But for now, the Marque Moon crosses will be done and documented, and then we watch. And enjoy late season beauty like this.

And continue the fall work list planning for 2026 improvements.

Surprise!

This morning I had quite a nice surprise – 6 new Mahala daylily seedlings came up in the little seedling pots! I continue to be amazed at the length of time this year’s seeds have taken to germinate. The Mahala seeds were planted in the starter pots on 4/23! Maybe the July heat, coupled with a few rainy days, was what they needed. With this nice surprise, I will leave the remaining planted Mahala seeds in the pots. Maybe more will still germinate.

Another nice treat – a new daylily I planted at the historic cemetery last fall has also bloomed. Red Volunteer bloomed yesterday. She is every bit as beautiful as I hoped, and pictures do not do her justice. She has such a lovely presence! She will be wonderful part of the garden there.

And, in the weirdest twist of the season, but a very welcome one – one, then a second, then a third, and today a fourth tiny baby hosta started to pop up in the spots where they were completely gone until a week ago, lost, even sunken ground. I have only seen that before when a plant has been dug up but a tiny part was unknowingly left behind. This whole lost hostas thing is so weird. I don’t know what to make of it. I will keep watching for more to revive.

This morning it was finally a bit cooler, so I got out into the garden with gusto. I did the last of the maintenance on the forget-me-nots that were wrapping up bloom, and then I cut the pink asian lilies all back to half height. They also wrapped up their bloom this past week. And, as my disciplined self 😉 reminded me, I needed to circle back and trim the peach asian lily stem I forgot last week, so I did that. It would have been kind of fun to see if it made seed, but, as I discovered this morning, I am already short of seedling box space 😉 We shall stick to the plan. Daylily propagation only.

With the forget-me-nots largely gone, this week I also did some additional research on eco friendly mid-season bunny, squirrel, and other digger repellent. Lemongrass came up in my reading, and I already had some diluted in a spray bottle, so I gave the pavers a spritz. We will see how that goes. So far, whatever was digging in the shamrock plant has stopped.

The daylilies are starting to bloom now, and the garden is ready for me to do crosses. I have cleared the blooming forget-me-nots, made paths again to get to the daylilies that are farther back in the garden, cut back the plants that have already bloomed so they don’t go to seed, and found an additional eco-friendly digger deterrent to take over for the forget-me-nots that have been pared back.

I will share daylily picks along the way.

Fill in Friday – Did you know forget-me-nots repel rabbits?

Daylily season is definitely here. Scapes are popping up on the daylilies, and two seedlings that have never put up scapes before are sporting buds this year. Our longest seedling holdout is even looking like it will finally bloom this year. Very good!

The ninebarks and the weigelia are wrapping up their blooms (at least the first flush), the asian lilies are blooming,

and the first hosta scape appeared a few days ago.

I continue to learn about propagating daylilies in the northern United States. Recently I read that in northern states it can take up to 10 years for a seedling to produce scapes and bloom! I almost gave up on our year one (holdout) seedling! I am so glad I didn’t! Now we wait to see what our pollinators created with that one.
(I harvested daylily seeds from pollinator creations for a few years before I started to do intentional crosses.)

Regarding intentional crosses, we now have a 5th and 6th Mahala seedling. I am shocked! Those were the ones I planted in little seedling pots 8 weeks ago! I guess it just goes to show that daylily propagation really does take serious patience.

Out front, the stonecrop have reached their max height before they start to “donut”. I probably should divide them this year, but I have nowhere to put divisions. Maybe a few could go to the historic cemetery. We shall see how much energy I have in September when it is time to divide and transplant. I just transplanted 7 more irises into the cemetery garden, and it is getting pretty full. But maybe …

All of the Blue Mouse Ears hosta divisions and transplants seem to be doing well, even in the sun at the historic cemetery gardens. Very good news! I will continue to monitor them. I need to divide some more of the more mature ones here again this fall. Last year I was scrambling and tucking them in as tests. But they did so well, now I know what they can handle.

Lastly, the progress on the forget-me-nots. I did a bunch of research and it turns out they are a bunny repellant. That does seem true, and that strategy lends itself to useful ideas, both for where to keep them and where to pull them. They are very pretty amongst the daylilies and hostas. A little bouquet.





Forget-me-Nots

We are in the middle of rain, rain, rain here for the past week or so and now we are heading into almost another whole week of rain lol. But Saturday I got a bunch of work done on the garden. That felt great!

Recently I shared that we lost a bunch of hostas. Those losses have spurred on change. Those losses made me rethink a lot about our garden set up. We lost those hostas because of of a number of reasons – fertilizer and herbicide overspray and then a few of them were expected because I knew tree roots were getting quite close. And because those reasons will not be going away, I am not replacing any of what was lost.

But that was not the end of the story. The space did not look “right”, and because there had been so many hostas there, other things that were previously minor parts of the garden – the forget-me-nots and the clover – began to flourish. Think no barriers like plastic underlayment under the rock …

Saturday I spent time paring back the forget-me-nots and the clover (and quite a few bunny planted raspberry seedlings) in prep for where I want to go with my next garden phase – expanding my daylily propagation work, needing more planter space. Just like anything, times are changing. I am in a new phase of my gardening, just like we all get to new phases of our life, and I need to have a little bit of reassessment of what will work for this.

Saturday I cleared all clover and forget-me-nots out of the front, left very little of it in the corner where the linden is, and cleared it away from the path out back.

I was unsure of what I wanted to do in the area that sustained the largest number of hosta losses, so I left just a little patch of clover and forget-me-nots there. This morning I decided. I moved the green shamrock into that area, and I like it, so the remaining clover and forget-me-not patch in that round of the corner will go.

And then I will tackle this.

I planted the forget-me-nots the year my father-in-law and a sweet neighbor friend passed weeks apart. The forget-me-nots are sentimental. And I have kept them inside the paver trim. Inside 😊 But I hardly think that stepping on forget-me-nots is a great way to remember those we have lost, and stepping on forget-me-not is definitely not part of my daylily propagation “vision ”, so, as they bloom and begin to fade, they will be pared way back. A heartwarming sprinklng that enhances the daylilies and remaining hostas out back.


Cherry trees and tulips

The cherry trees in the association stated blooming a couple weeks ago.  Who doesn’t love their blooms?

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They are stunningly beautiful for two-three weeks and then fade to the background to start building for next year’s show.

Similarly, the tulips take center stage at the ground level at about the same time.  Immediately following the crocus, they put on quite a show.

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I love it all!  Here’s my dilemma – Unlike the cherry trees, the tulips are more of a “one and done” most years.  Essentially they are fall planted annuals that bloom the next spring.  In the years after the initial bloom year they are awesome at growing … leaves, but no blooms.

This spring, last years tulips looked like this.

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As beautiful as the tulips are, I have another plan.  I am going to dig them out, reclaim that real estate, and plant some of the baby Purple d’ Oro daylily seedlings in that spot.  If they take off, in future years they would look absolutely lovely in front of the sedum.

Having repurposed that space, when the spring bulbs start showing up for order and purchase later this season, I have an alternate option.  I have, in past years forced tulip, hyacinth, and crocus bulbs in large plant pots.  Maybe I’ll do that this fall again.

 

 

Beautiful day; more snow on the way

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Yesterday was a beautiful sunny day following an almost aqua colored night due to the upcoming super snow moon.  Last night’s sunset, however, told a “not yet” story as clouds rolled in for the 6-10″ of snow we are supposed to get today.  It looks like we are headed into our typical March snow pattern, with big snowfalls followed by slowly increasing temperatures.  It may not feel like it today, but spring is on the way.

Up north, it may take longer.  We hear the snow is waist deep.  But Minnesotans are hearty folk 😉  One gentleman told us he and his wife snowshoed out to grill shrimp on the fire.  We are dreaming of that day!  Maybe next year winter we can do that.

Sunrise, Sunset

Last Friday I couldn’t sleep past 5am so I got up and had a leisurely start to the day.  About six I thought about taking a short snooze but then looked out the patio blinds and … It was the start of an absolutely glorious dawn.

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Just on the edge, the crickets were still chirping and the first bird flew past.  Then I heard rustling, and a chirp.  Then the cardinal tested out his morning singing.  Absolutely wonderful.  I had to grab a sweatshirt, a cup of hot cider, and my phone.

The first squirrel came by.

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Mama cardinal came for some breakfast.  Two hummingbirds flitted around and around for over half an hour, sipping at the feeder a bit, and stopping by the ‘Rainforest Sunrise’ blooms.  An hour and a half later I reluctantly reminded myself that no, an impromptu vacation day was not an option this time.  But it was a fabulous start of the day.

The sunset that night was cloudless.  A beautiful, gorgeous fall day.  No clouds meant a clear sunset.

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The next morning the sunrise had just the faintest line of clouds.

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Another gorgeous day.  The squirrels and birds arrived.  The hummingbirds chirped.  Our guest in the garden arrived and we enjoyed his company.

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And so it goes.  Tulips to lilies to hostas to sedum to an abundance of leaves on the ground to snow drifts.  Ground with frost to days with air conditioning and back to days with sweatshirts on.  I have worn out another pair of my oldest sandals, dubbed this year’s “garden sandals” and am considering which pair will have the job next year.

There are big moments and tiny moments, moments that sneak up on you, moments you plan for, moments you anxiously await.  I had a crazy busy week at work, overbooked myself socially, and fell into bed last night early.  My husband had a routine week. After months of planning and outfitting and practicing, our oldest son and his girlfriend will start their first season of bow hunting today.  We are waiting patiently to hear our youngest son has completed his Pacific Crest Trail through hike.  The sun comes up, the day proceeds, the sun goes down.

Today, in this moment, the sun is rising in a completely different place than last week.  It is shining through different pine trees.  While I sit here, at the same moment, a few geese went honking by and the humingbirds approached the feeder.  The hummingbirds are still, in this moment, dancing and chirping.  The first squirrel of the day has arrived.  The robins are gone (that we can tell).  The geese have been flocking up, and it will be quite a few months until the dark-eyed junkos arrive. We probably won’t be sitting out on the patio for very long periods of time then.

Sunrise, Sunset

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