I reported earlier that all the crosses from Hemlady seemed to have returned except for cross 201718T and none of those had returned out of the five seedlings planted last year. I need to update that because I noticed that there are now four of those seedling emerging from dormancy. I am assuming that the cross 'Star Man's Quest' x 'Scrambled Legs' was just the most dormant of all the crosses being they were so late emerging. Nice to see them finally making a show after winter.
Both show to be dormants:
Daylily (Hemerocallis 'Starman's Quest') x Daylily (Hemerocallis 'Scrambled Legs')
Back on Feb. 12th I planted some sprouted seeds from the refrigerator. I am happy to report that this morning I now have seedlings in all 12 cups.
Here is a photo of a hawk I took this morning, he was hopefully looking for snakes, gophers, moles, etc. More than likely he is looking at my neighbors chickens.
I should have posted these photos this morning, but I had to take my grandson to the hospital then I had to get busy in the garden, so I am just getting around to taking photos and posting them.
Here are the 12 cups of sprouted seedings I planted on Feb. 12th, they are still emerging.
Some are just now breaking through.
This cups has nine seedlings so far.
Edited: Looking at my photo I see several more seedlings emerging than I noticed when I took the photo.
I just finished up my last two seedling beds, 3 and 4. I am pleased with how they are looking. I had more seedlings that I had actually planned for so even though bed 3 and 4 were to be put to use later in the year, bed three already has four rows of seedlings in it.
Having finally finished the seedling beds, I moved back down to the bog and started to work down there again. I am in the process of widening a row to allow me to have more room to work that row, and to help keep the critters from digging.
I am also in the process of adding one more row to the bog bed.
A few daffodils are blooming around the garden.
The Spanish Blue bells Kabby gave me are showing now.
I even have a few white cemetery Iris starting to bloom.
The most exciting thing is that my Amaryllis are really starting to spring up now.
A few of my Amaryllis seedlings I have grown over the past few years.
Some of the ones I saved from my parents home.
Here are some of the excess seedlings I will be giving away this year to my daughters and friends, I had way to many seeds, but this is my first year, and I was a little to ambitious.
These are some seedlings I might still plant, but there were a lot of small ones in the mix and I decided to let them grow on some more.
I have been trying to figure out how to use my numbering system to label my daylily crosses I will have this year. I had purchased some seeds from Hemlady last year and I decided to check them out and see how my numbering system was working with them, being there are not that many of them. I thought that would be way easier that working with the larger number of seedlings I will have.
I was very surprised to see how well most of them have survived over the winter, very few have not shown any new growth returning this year. With the exception of one cross 18T ('Star Man's Quest X Scrambled Legs', I had planted 5 plants back in the fall and I can't find a single one of them now.
I had to pull the mulch back, as you can see in the photos, to find some of the small just emerging seedlings.
I am still a little undecided about when to actually assign a number to the crosses. I was leaning toward waiting till bloom time, that would be a lot less trouble. However, I enjoyed looking over my list of Hemlady crosses and I had recorded the number of seedlings I had grown and planted and I assigned a number to each cross then just lined the plants out in a row behind the tag. That made it easy because of consistent spacing to see the plants and where there should be plants. So I am going to experiment a little more with assigning numbers to growing seedlings before they bloom.
So this afternoon I played around a little with my own seedlings. I pulled one of the cups containing some 201706F seedlings up out of the ground. There were 5 seedlings in the cup. As shown in the photos below some were much larger than others, one was very small. I have found this to be the case with a lot of my cups, some seedlings sprouted in the fall and have grown all winter, others are just now sprouting...all in the same cup. What I really wanted to check on was root development, and make sure the plants were not growing through the drainage holes and into the ground below. Once again, as can be seen in the photos the roots are growing through and into the ground. It just happened that it is actually one of the better developed cups, not many contain larger seedlings than this. I did check a few other cups and the roots are not as well developed but they are starting to grow though into the soil also.
My first cup of seedlings to be removed from the cups, divided, and planted in the new seedling bed. Seedling 201706F 'Gentle Shepherd'x 'Happy and Blessed'.
You can see how the roots were growing out of the bottom of the cup.
A closeup view of the roots.
The five seedlings separated out of the cup.
The seedlings planted in the new bed.
I will have to come up with a much more efficient method of planting, what I did was not very efficient and took a long time just to plant my five seedlings. I need to have my markers made up in advance, and I need to have the cups I want to plant selected and gathered together beforehand in a flat. I think I need to use my dribbler and make a row of holes all at once and have them ready with extra soil before I start planting. One seeding at a time like I did just is not going to get it I'm afraid.
I used this salvaged kite string spool to make my holes with and it worked really well.
I originally thought that I would look over my list and organize all my cups with the same cross together and plant them that way. I realized today that would not work because they were not all planted at the same time and some are ready to be planted and others need to grow longer before being planted. So instead of having everything organized and planted in numerical sequence I will end up planting them as they seem mature enough to be planted. So instead of identical crosses being grouped together they will end up being spaced out in the beds.
Just realized I planted the wrong cup of seedlings, I meant to plant 'Beautiful Edgings' X 'Happy and Blessed' I will have to change the number on my maker.
Yesterday I decided to look in the refrigerator and see if I had any more daylily seeds to sprout. I was surprised to find that I had quite a few. Most of them were of the same two crosses but I did have a few more also. I took the little zip lock baggies out of the refrigerator and out to the shed to pot them up. First I had to make a quick trip to Lowe's for some potting soil, I already had a bag of Perlite. I filled up some red plastic cups I had salvage and then added a thin layer of sand (this has become my standard way of planting my seeds). Normally I would use my own compost but due to all the new beds I have been working on I found it easier and quicker just to run up to Lowe's. I was a little shocked when I opened the large bag of potting soil to see it was very wet and somewhat moldy. I just figured the seeds are going to be outside anyhow so they need to be tough, so I just stirred up the mold along with the soil and went ahead and planted the seeds. I mixed in one cup of perlite to two cups of potting soil and that seemed to give me a light well draining mixture. I finished with 12 cups of seeds and probably averaged between six and eight seeds per cup.
Most of the seeds I planted outside back in December came up and did well for a while, then we had those two very cold spells, some of them appeared to have died some appear to be dormant(could be dead also) but a few of them are still doing well. I put the green growing ones planted in December in the same flat as the newly plated seeds.
Here is a photo of all the cups in the flat, the cups in the back are ones that have no visible seedlings and were planted back in Dec.
The newly planted seeds are in the 12 cups on the left. If the small bags had sprouted seeds, I went ahead and planted all the seeds in that bag, sprouted or not. It appears Gypsy Rose Lee x Accent on Style, and Carlotta X Happy and Blessed had by far the most sprouted seeds.
The weather report for the next 10 days is showing to be very favorable: Highs in the mid to upper 70's and low's in the upper 50's to lower 60's. So I will keep an eye of the seeds and see when they first start showing new seedlings, I am hoping within a week.
I have gotten interested in the sculpted form: relief (not exactly sure how to express that) of daylilies. I had a few plants already that have been used by hybridizers to create some very nice sculpted relief form daylilies, but I wanted a few more to work with. I ordered 'Bas Relief', and 'Empire Returns' to use in making some crosses later this year. I also ordered 'Feather Woman' just because it is listed at 49+ buds and 9+ branches, it is a dip.
I was not sure how to pronounce the "Bas ", and believe it or not there was a you tube video pronouncing it. Then I saw another you tube video explaining what Bas Relief actually is, it is a type of sculpting on flat clay. more or less.
Seeing what Bas Relief actually is made me realize just how appropriately the daylily is named.
On Order:
'Bas Relief'
