The yard sale prep continues. The plants have been groomed and the pots sorted by cultivar.

Because of all the rain this spring, there seems to be a higher percentage of scapes than usual. The plants are in 1-gal pots and 40-50% of the pots already have scapes. Many of the fans are also larger than in drier years.

This is a bloom of John Hawkins from one of the plants that's in the yard sale. A 1-gal pot is a little small for growing daylilies but the bloom still looked pretty good. The plants do ok in in the 1-gal pots during the cooler months but struggle once the summer heat arrives. I use 1-gal pots for my sale because they are easier for people to transport than larger pots.

I pot the sale plants up in the fall and they establish a nice root ball over the winter and spring. They can then be transplanted without setback if the root ball is undisturbed. Personally, I never purchase any bare root daylilies in the spring as I believe they don't have enought time to get completely established before our 4 months of 90+ degree days. If I lived in a less severe summer climate, I wouldn't worry about bare root planting in the spring.

I'm really too busy today to write anything but I did want to post a picture from this morning's garden.

This is seedling 13-002 blooming for the first time this year. For me, this is what hybridizing is all about - a happy daylily face!

Thunder showers have been rumbling through this morning but it's expected to clear shortly. While the rain has delayed my start in the garden, it is welcome as I had planned to water my yard sale pots later today and now that's not necessary. So while waiting for clearing, I thought I'd post.

Next weekend is my annual daylily yard sale. I look forward to this sale every year, not just because I make a little money to buy more daylilies, but also because I meet so many nice daylily people. Today and tomorrow I will be preparing for the sale. If you would like to see what I'm offering in this year's sale, check out my daylily website Hemerocallis - The Daylily.

Hybridizing results don't always go as planned (understatement!). The bloom for seedling 13-024 above looked about as expected but the scape height and branching were a bit of a surprise. The scapes are much taller than either parent reaching 50" this year. That would be ok as a novelty plant except that the bud count is low (11) and they are all at the top of the scape.

Gardening this year has been a bit of a struggle. Between having a cold wet spring which delayed much of my spring cleanup work and working extra hours oh my day job, I am way behind on all my garden chores. I am now ready to have my garden tilled so I can transplant my new seedlings but my yard guy is having problems with his tiller and I'm on hold for that.

Enough grumbling however. Blooms are starting to pick up, mostly seedlings, and that always keeps me smiling!

This is seedling 13-009 which had its first bloom of the season yesterday. I took this picture about 6:00 pm when I got home from work so the bloom isn't all that fresh. Still it looked decent enough that I took it with me to my daylily club meeting last night.

The bud count on this has been disappointing but many in my front yard suffered from invasive tree roots and too much shade. The trees were removed this spring so next year should be much better.

My project for this past weekend was to remove the weeds that had taken root in my potted daylilies and top dress the pots with leaf mold compost. I managed to get the 125 or so seedling pots done but I didn't get to any of the cultivar pots.

It was an absolutely perfect day outside today. The humidity was down with a nice breeze making it very pleasant. The birds were singing all day. The primary cast included white winged doves, blue jays (they don't sing), mockingbirds, and a little fellow with a very loud voice (no clue what it was). By far the most abundant bird in my neighborhood are the doves. They are everywhere and they start callling about 4:00 am every morning.

Not every keeper seedling makes the grade because it's an extra pretty face. While this one (15-002) is attractive enough, I marked it for further evaluation based on its performance. It has 6-way branching and 23 buds - not bad for a first year seedling that is crammed in together with many other seedlings. Typically, seedlings grown in these conditions will average 9-12 buds the first year. In addition to the branching, it was already sending up a second scape as the first one was opening it's first bloom. It's a sib to 15-001 that I posted a few days ago.

While walking the garden this morning I found a couple of scapes that had blasted. Scape blasting, while not particularly common, seems to happen after heavy rain especially if the temperatures are mild and the garden has been recently fertilized.

Scape blasting is basically when the scape puts on a sudden growth spurt and the pressure inside the scape exceeds the scapes ability to contain it. Here's an example of what I found this morning.

In this case the scape was blasted completely off but this is not always the case. Sometimes, the scape is partially blasted and some tissue remains. In these cases the scape may still produce blooms although often smaller in size because of the reduced amount of nutrients that comes through the reduced scape tissue.

Some years ago I had the experience of standing about ten feet from a daylily scape as it suddenly blasted. There had been an all night rain and the sun was out. I heard a sudden 'pop' and turned to see the top part of the scape landing a few feet away from the plant.

This is seedling 15-007. It was the first new seedling I saw this morning. Like so many others it is a pretty face without any great distinction. Pretty faces however are what makes for a happy hybridizer. If I always expected every bloom to be super special, I would surely be dissappointed most, if not all of the time.

After struggling against daylily rust this spring, I finally figured out why I seemed to be losing the battle. I did some research and found that my lack of knowledge was causing me to allow rust to become resistant to the fungicide I was using. It turns out that rust can become resistant to several of the more effective fungicides. The answer is to rotate between different classes of fungicides to prevent resistance from building up against any one fungicide. Last weekend I used a fungicide from a different class and it seems to have killed all the active rust. Now I know better... I'll rotate back and forth between the two from now on.

After a nice rain for most of the night, several new seedlings put out their first blooms today. We continue in a wet weather pattern with about 4" falling in my garden over the past 24 hours. Daylilies love rain and most of the scapes are nice and fat. Unfortunately, the cool wet spring may have produced a slightly lower than average bud count.

This is another from this year's new crop. Seedling 15-004 has a 5.5" bloom. It comes from a cross of (Martin Blondeel X Calamity Jane).

The wait is finally over!! I had my first couple of blooms today, both first year bloom seedlings. Neither had real star power but I thought one was pretty enough to photograph and post below.

2013 was a poor year for seed production. The time between when blooming really got started and when the daily 90 degrees plus settled in was only a little over 2 weeks. That resulted in a much smaller than usual seed crop. Fortunately, 2012 was a great year for seeds and I still had a few left over in the fridge. I planted them and today's seedlings were from the 2012 seeds.

Seedling 2015-01 comes from the cross MISSISSIPPI MEMENTO x CALAMITY JANE. The cultivars are both pink with red eyes so I wasn't expecting a lot of variety. I was hoping for the great bud count of MISSISSIPPI MEMENTO with the larger bloom size of CALAMITY JANE. It doesn't appear I succeeded with either of today's seedlings. Still it was a pretty enough face especially for a first bloom.

Seedling 15-001

Three from the same cross last year showing a little variety

I always find it interesting that the first year seedlings tend to start blooming before the other daylilies in the garden. This year my first bloom bed has dozens of scapes coming up while my cultivar bed only has a few scapes so far.

Having a great garden is the result of many factors coming together. The garden site must be selected based on the amount of sun needed for the plants you will be growing. The soil has to be prepared to give the plants a good place to grow. The right plants have to be selected and placed in such a way as to give a pleasing appearance. It's also important to look to the future to envision what the plants will look like in a few years. In a way, creating a beautiful and long lasting garden is like creating a work of art. But the initial creation of the garden is only the beginning. Once planted, the garden must then be maintained.

Maintaining a garden is in some ways, like being a doctor. You have to give your garden regular checkups to keep it healthy. You have to feed your soil because the soil feeds your plants. You have to watch for pests or fungal diseases and take steps to minimize them if and when they appear. This is especially true if you grow a large number of the same type of plant (like daylilies) as mono-culture tends to attract large numbers of pests.

The key to being a successful garden 'doctor' is to be a good observer and learn from your observations. Catch problems early on and they will be easier to resolve. That's usually easy enough for problems like weeds (so obvious...) but aphids and snails are not as obvious unless you know to watch for them. Taking good care of your daylilies will make them happy and happy daylilies make for a happy garden doctor (smile).

I haven't posted any seedling pictures in a while so here is 12-032. This came from a cross between (What A Surprise X Sweet Tranquility). Because of the 'popcorn' edging, it sometimes has some trouble opening, especially early in the season. Later on, it does better.

I posted yesterday about Walter Kennedy not doing well in a couple of locations and then taking off when grown in a pot. This daylily was obviously NOT happy in the first two locations and became VERY happy when I put it in a pot. So why was that? I don't know for sure but I can make a guess based on observations.

I don't believe there was any problem with the original two locations. Daylilies planted after Walter Kennedy was moved did just fine. That leaves just the pot and the potting medium as variable factors.

The garden soil had been well ammended with compost over many years. It was fertile, drained well, and had a substantial population of earthworms, a sign of healthy soil. The potting medium turned out not to be very good. It was my first attempt at mixing my own potting soil and it was too light and drained too easily. The majority of daylilies I planted in this medium did 'ok' at best.

So my guess is that the potting medium was the reason for the improved growth - WK liked the loose soil and didnt' do well in the denser, albiet more fertile garden soil.

This is Blue Hippo (Lambertson 2005). I purchased this in 2013 despite not being able to find a good picture of it on the internet. I was not dissappointed (understatement)! I should bloom some Blue Hippo kids in 2016.

I sure hope the daylilies do as well as the weeds are doing this year. The abundant rain earlier has led to a bumper crop of all kinds of weeds. Tomorrow is supposed to be cool so hopefully I can make a dent in them.

This is a picture of WALTER KENNEDY (Stamile 2008) taken last year and it's every bit as striking as it looks.

The first couple of years in my garden, WK didn't perform very well. It had small plants, a low bud count, and it didn't rebloom. After a couple of years I moved it to another location. It got a little better but it still didn't perform all that well. I kept it because I really liked the color (and maybe because I'm an eternal optimist). A couple of years ago after moving it into a 7-gal pot, it suddenly took off. It's been going gangbusters ever since.

We have gone fairly abruptly from cooler than normal to warmer than normal temperatures. This morning's low was only 71 F. which is more typical of the usual high temperatures for this time of year. This afternoon temps were in the mid 80's.

This warm weather has caused the daylilies to grow like crazy! Late Saturday afternoon, I cut the tops off the fans I was going to remove from the one year seedling bed (see yesterday's post). When I started removing fans on Sunday some of the center leaves had grown up to 3/4" overnight and this without being fertilized during the past year.

I continue to see a few new scapes each day. While I'm not very good at predicting how long it takes for a scape to begin blooming, I believe I'll see my first bloom probably in a couple of weeks.

I have always bought most of my daylilies signt unseen, except perhaps for an image on the internet. I'm usually reasonably happy with this but sometimes I'm happier than others. This is April Laquinta (Petit 2006) and to me it turned out better than most of the internet pictures I saw before purchasing it. I was very pleased indeed! It's listed as a 7" bloom and while I didn't actually measure it, I'm pretty sure its size was as advertised. A round form with wide petals has always been my favorite.

After I have transplanted the seedlings selected from my first year bloom bed, there are always lots of plants remaining. These are the plants that for whatever reason, I didn't think worth evaluating beyond the first year. They usually include a bunch that had obvious flaws (like poor color, didn't open very well, or had a low bud count) as well as the usual group of common looking blooms (nice enough but not distinctive). These have to be removed from the bed to make room for the next crop of newly planted seeds.

I just finished removing all these plants and found that many of the fans were unusually large this year. I attribute the large fans to the wet spring we had. I usually have 4 or 5 boxes full of fans to give away but this year I had 6 boxes and probably could have filled a couple more if I had more boxes. The difference was the size of the fans and not the number of fans.

I remember visiting a garden in Louisiana some years back and the plants were huge as were the blooms. When the garden owner was asked what fertilizer he was using he said he didn't use any fertilizer. The results we were seeing were because they had a lot of rain that spring. This year I can certainly confirm what he said about rain from the results in my own garden.

I usually post pictures of fancy looking daylilies but tonight I thought I'd post something with a little nostalgia. This is seedling 00-048 which first bloomed back in the year 2000. It has a bud count in the 20's and performs quite well but I never registered it because to me it's not distinctive, something I look for when selecting for registration. Still, I have always liked it so I continue to grow it.

I purchased a half yard of leaf mold compost this weekend. It's currently setting in my driveway because I'm not quite ready to use it. With spring in full swing, landscapers and home gardeners will be lining up to get their materials from the soil yard so I wanted to get the compost before the place got too crazy.

I started using leaf mold compost a couple of years ago because I heard it helps to feed the soil. It smells great reminding me of the woods near where I grew up. It's also a great source of microorganisms which help plants take up nutrients.

I'm going to try mulching my potted daylilies with it to keep down weeds and hold in moisture. I haven't mulched my pots before but part of the fun of gardening is trying new things. Whatever compost remains will be tilled into the new seedling bed.

This is seedling 12-079. It was from a cross between Hedwig's Eyes and Facepaint. Facepaint never had a great bud count in my garden and I'm afraid 12-079 seems to be taking after Facepaint as far as bud count goes. Still, it's a pretty face so I keep it around hoping it will eventually do better.

I HAVE SCAPES (yes, I AM shouting)!

While spraying for rust this morning I found 8 scapes rising above the foliage. That means that bloom season will soon be upon us. All but 2 of the scapes were on first bloom seedlings. I have found that in general, first year seedlings tend to start blooming a little earlier than the rest of the garden.

Last weekend there were no scapes showing but it has been in the 70's all week and the warm temperatures are making everything grow like crazy. Of course that includes weeds. I sure dislike pulling weeds. They say that when a person reaches their golden years, they shrink a little in height. It sure doesn't seem that way as the ground keeps getting farther away as I get older.

This is a picture of Orchids And Gold (Smith-FR 2008). 2014 was its first year in my garden so I don't know if it will be a great performer or not. But the color always catches my eye when it's blooming.

We had a nice rain here yesterday. That makes a little over 2" over the past three days. I've heard it said that ample water is more important for great daylilies than fertilizer. If that's true, this should be a great year!

Today the weather was beautiful so I got to work in the garden all day. I had previously moved a bunch of my 7-gal pots to the side of the yard so a dead pine tree could be removed. Today I moved the last 32 pots back to their home. They were much heavier than when I first moved them because of yesterday's rain. Good thing I have my little red wagon!

I also removed leaves and a few weeds from my seedling trays. No, I don't cover the trays with leaves in the winter. My neighbor has a huge oak tree and every fall many the leaves make their way onto my seedling trays. The leaves are small (most around 1" long) and they don't seem to have any affect on the seedlings so I leave them where they fall. Most of the new seedlings stop growing during January & February if it's cold enough and removing the leaves in March allows the sun to warm the soil which promotes a nice growth spurt prior to transplanting them.

There are few daylilies that are considered to be really white. Seedling 11-094 above isn't quite white but it's probably the whitest seedling I have produced so far. It only had a bud count of 6 the first year so at first I didn't mark it to be kept. I eventually realized how white it was and marked it to see if it would get better with room to grow. It hasn't made the 20 bud count minimum yet but it's getting close.

Because I have a significant tree root problem, I started moving my daylilies into pots a couple of years ago. I wanted to give the plants plenty of room to grow and multiply so I decided to use 7-gal pots. So far this seems to be an ideal size as they have grown and multiplied well in the pots and the pots aren't so large as to make it impossible for me to move them around.

The first growing medium I used didn't turn out very well. I mixed my own using a cheap rose soil with some perlite, vermiculite, and a small amount of compost. I also added some 'Watersorb Crystals' to help retain moisture. The stuff looked great going into the pots but I wasn't happy with the results. The daylilies sulked for 3-4 months after planting and the mix was not consistent in the way it drained when watered. With some pots the water seemed to just run out the drain holes in the bottom while others seemed to dry out the top half of the soil quickly while the bottom half stayed way too wet. Nevertheless, after a year most of the daylilies were looking pretty good and some were starting to multiply.

The next year I found a container mix at Nature's Way Resources in Conroe that has done a great job. At first I thought it would be too heavy but once I saw how well it drained I was very pleased. Here's what it says on their website about the mix:

This mix was formulated to provide an option for gardeners and landscapers that are frustrated with potting soils that are too light for long term container use and landscape/garden mixes that are too heavy and drain too poorly for container culture. This mix drains well, but also has the right soil mix components to help the mix maintain adequate moisture levels and avoid shrinking too quickly. This mix has been supplemented with organic fertilizers making it ready to use.

The lady running the register at Nature's Way told me the owner had originally mixed this for his personal use in starting seeds and it turned out so well, that he decided to add it to his product line. So far I am very happy with it as are the daylilies I've planted in it.

This afternoon I printed out pictures of the daylilies we will be raffling off at my local daylily club meeting this week (we have raffles at all our meetings). One of the daylilies was New Paradigm (Stamile 2008) which I have grown since 2010. I thought it would be a good picture for today's post.

When I got home from work today, I checked to make sure that I had been successful in knocking down the aphid infestation. The results were good as no live aphids could be found.

I use a systemic insecticide to kill the aphids because systemics have a residual effect. A general insecticide kills the aphids it hits but as their eggs hatch, a new infestation can be in full swing within a couple of weeks. With a systemic, as soon as the baby aphids start sucking the plant juices they die.

Currently, I'm using Bonide Systemic Insecticide. It is not rated for daylilies but I sprayed it on a few plants as a test with no detrimental effects. Once I determined it didn't harm the daylilies, I have been using it for a couple of years now.

Note: I won't use Bonide after I see my first scape. The residual lasts 3-4 weeks and I don't want to accidently kill any bees.

This is Passion and Pride (Bell 2010). It has been a favorite ever since it first bloomed in my garden in 2013.

It has been amazing how quickly spring has arrived this year. It didn't warm up until a couple of weeks ago and now many of the spring blooming shrubs and trees are in their full glory. My Camelia and Roses were the first to bloom in my yard. Then I started seeing Bradford Pear and Carolina Jasmine blooming everywhere I went. Tonight as I was driving home from work I noticed that Azaleas and Redbud trees had joined the show as well as a number of others that I couldn't identify.

That has to mean that daylilies won't be far behind. If the weather stays warm, bloom season may be on schedule.

This is seedling 12-005. It is definitely on my watch list as it reached my 20 bud minimum last year even with competition from all the tree roots. I transplanted it into a pot last fall so it will probably be another couple of years before I see its true potential.

It has been a wet, cool spring here in Houston. I'm not complaining, mind you. Since experiencing the great drought of 2011, untimely rain is a mere inconvenenience compared with going literally months without any rain.

This week the cool weather pattern seems to have finally broken. Temperatures have been more seasonal with highs in the 70's but the wet weather pattern remains. We're expecting rain tomorrow and again on Saturday. The daylilies will be SO happy.

The biggest result from this spring's the weather is that I am way behind on my spring tasks. I have mulched and fertilized the front beds but my 300+ pots haven't been touched. They need to be mulched and fertilized. I also haven't had a chance to prepare the seedling bed for the new seed crop. With heavy rain forecast for Saturday the ground will be too wet on Sunday and another week will pass by without getting this done.

This was my favorite seedling from 2014. I registered it this spring as GINA JARVIS after my wife. It has a 5.5" bloom with 28 buds on a 26" scape.

If you're looking for the "Hybridizer Daydreams Daylily Blog" to see how I do my hybridizing, I have converted that blog into a calendar format. You can find it here

This new blog is titled "The Happy Daylily" and will be more devoted to daylily pictures with a little 'what I'm up to at the moment' thrown in. I hope you enjoy the new format!

Despite the cool spring, the daylilies are looking pretty good. The foliage is getting lush and some plants look like they could put up a scape at any time.

This past weekend I finished mulching the front yard beds. I put down about a 3" layer of aged hardwood mulch. I used this last year for the first time and was impressed with the results. It held down the weeds and being hardwood I don't believe it sucked all the nitrogen out of the soil like mulches made from more readily decomposable materials.

I also sprayed for aphids. While I don't enjoy spraying insecticides, the aphids were getting totally out of control and causing obvious damage to the new foliage on the plants.

Of course there isn't anything blooming at the moment, so I thought I'd post a few of my favorites from the 2014 bloom season.

This is Crystal Smith (Smith-Harry-P 2011) was probably my favorite registered daylily from last year. It has that nice round form with heavy yellow ruffled edges. I think it may be the huge yellow eye over the baby ribbon pink that makes it so eye catching.