Only little things mostly getting done in the garden these days because it is so hot and humid. Most of my gardening is weeding these days. Fortunately I have been blessed this year with lots of rain and I have to spend very little time watering, normally at this time of year that occupies most of my time, now it is weeds.
I think I must have had a possum family move into my garden at night, they are digging every where down in the bog bed. The good news is I have most of the small plants caged and that is really helping. I only have one plant that looks like it is really being harmed and that is one clump of 'Paper Butterfly', and it now planted too deep so it needs to be lifted and replanted anyhow. I am waiting for seed pods to mature on it first though. I have put so much compost and mulch around the plants and it has shifted over time so the plants were being smothered almost with the mulch up against them. While the possums are digging for earthworms they have been doing a great job of pulling the mulch away from the base of the plants.
Speaking of seed pods, that is a major time consumer right now for me in the garden. I go out in the mornings and start looking for mature seed pods and proliferations on my daylilies. Naturally I have to poke around in the plants tugging on all the scapes (I am learning that if a scape is hard to remove when I tug on it to look very close before giving it a second harder tug because that is often a sign the scape has a pod or proliferation growing on it.) Well, while poking around looking down in the plants I start removing all the old dead leaves, the old brown scapes, and give the plant a nice clean up job while frisking it for prolifs and pods. This morning again surprised me with new seed pods and prolifs, I often think because I collected them one day there won't be any the next, but there normally are.
I ended up with pods off of 8 plants, prolifs off of two and found several more with prolifs I had not noticed before. Got all those plants cleaned up and they looked so much better.
Over the past few days I have been drilling holes in cups, filling them with growing medium(compost and sand), and planting a few of my newly collected seeds. Others I am placing in small baggies and putting them in the fridge, I am getting quite the collection of them now.
Raining again today on and off, not getting much. Got another 1.5 inches yesterday however.
I bought some cups yesterday, not remembering I had already bought cups, so now I have plenty. In between showers I took my bulb planter and some cups out to physically lay out the first seedling bed. I realized that because of the way my aluminum frames slope that I would only be able to get three rows of 10 in the bed instead of 4 because the cups on each side would have to be moved away from the edges to account for the low clearance on the sides. So now in the three beds total instead of 120 plants I can only get 90, but after reading up a bit and realizing just what is involved I think that might actually be better. It will however force me into making some tough decisions when selecting which seeds get planted and which ones get left in the fridge for a while. So glad to have the refrigerator just for the garden.
I also went around doing some more pollen dabbing, but really need to stop now. I also made a list of the plants that were showing seed pods already, it was near fifty. Some had as many as seven maybe more seed pods. So If I only average 2 seeds per pod....space would start running out very quickly. But, I think nearly everyone that does this always ends up with more seeds than they can plant. This is really making me get better acquainted with my plants, I have make a Dip list , a Tet list, a dormant list, lists of all the crosses etc., it seems I have lists of lists now.
Beginning to get a little concerned because not a single seed put down in the garden in my cups has germinated. So last night I started doing sort of a back up with some extra seeds I have already accumulated. I purchased some of those very small zip lock baggies , borrowed some cotton balls from my wife, mixed up a two liter bottle of peroxide, placed the finished little packets in the fridge drawer. I will see how long it takes any of them to germinate. I know due to the high heat we are having the germination rate will be delayed or very low. So maybe by placing some in the cool temps of the refrigerator I will increase my odds of getting some germinated seeds.
I have reached my goal of 200 named cultivars but today I ordered four new plants, but they will not be delivered until the fall so that gives me more time to decide just which ones to get rid of .
I have a large project planned for this fall, (actually I have already started on it) and I will be moving a lot of plants around, so by default I might lower my total number of named cultivars.
We have not had any rain for three days now, but the state overall had the 3rd wettest June in history, and I do believe my garden got most of that. So, I have been keeping an eye out on 'Look Here Mary', it should probably be the largest daylily in my garden and last year it looked great. I had high hopes this year for it to really improve and be a real show stopper. However, it never sent up a scape, the leaves starting looking haggard, then I could see a noticeable decline in the plant so today I dug it up. The large root system still looked very healthy, but the crown was not. I could smell a distant order coming from the plant when I dug it up, and not a pleasant smell either. Yes, rot had set in and that is why the plant was in decline. Normally the bog bed is wet and I am surprised how well the plants do, but a few of the daylilies just don't seem to like the boggy wet home they live in. I had to toss the main body of the plant, but I did have one large fan with some crown and roots that looked like I might could save it, and two small fans that looked like they should be able to be salvaged also. I threw the entire stinky mess in the wheelbarrow, washed everything down with the hose, then soaked the selected fans in a bleach solution. I replanted the fans in a single pot and placed it in the shade. I did not water it yet, I thought it might want to dry out just a little and take in a breath of fresh air.
I dug up two huge clumps of Flore Pleno today that I moved before because they had overtaken named varieties, hoping to be able to give those away this year. I normally give dozens of clumps of plants away each year and I do already have people lined up for them....thank goodness!
Today I also found a bee pod on 'Mister Lucky' it only had two seeds left in it, but they were fat, black and shiny so I planted them in cup and placed the cup with a label down in the seedling bed. I have added about 5 cups now with bee pods, 'Red Volunteer' had 10 beautiful large seeds in one pod. I placed 5 seeds each in two cups and put them in the seedling bed also. 'Missouri Memories' only had one seed left in the pod I found in it.
I went to WalMart yesterday and bought Markers, tape and labels but forgot to buy more cups. I am like a kid waiting for Christmas...those seed pods just will not mature fast enough. I looked over all the plants I pollinated and there are seed pods forming, but it seems a whole lot of them have not formed any pods. Still I will probably end up with more seeds than I will be able to plant. I had not realized just how fast the seeds would accumulate, the numbers add up fast. I think I will have to put a limit on how many seeds of each cross I plant, otherwise I will probably run out of room pretty fast. I am setting myself a limit of 5 seeds per cup also, they should not be too crowed in the cups for a couple of months at least like that. That will give them time to develop good roots and be able to be transplanted.
Pollination week has just finished but I am just getting started playing like a bee. There were so many great photos posted last week, it has inspired me to do some pollination of my own with my daylilies. I have been following the thread in the daylily forum showing photos of seedlings and that also inspired me to try some crosses of my own. With a base of 200 plants I figure I should be able to at least come up with a few keepers just for my garden any how. I have reached my goal of 200 named cultivars, but still have 30 plants on my want list. So I am going to have to make some hard decisions before adding any more named plants. Actually I am already down to 199 due to the loss of 'Sweet Cynthia'.
So for the past two days I have been doing some pollinating, some Dips and some Tets starting out on a small scale because I really don't want to overextend myself with too many plants, still I do want to try this. So in just a few minutes of buzzing around the garden like a busy bee, I have crossed all I plan on this year unless something special strikes my fancy.
I drew up a diagram of how I want to to plant them in my three new little seedling beds. The captions on this are misleading but what it actually means is that I will be able to put 16 dip seedlings in each of three small sections of the beds, and 24 Tet seedlings in each of the three large sections of the beds. Forty plants per bed x three for a total of 120 small seedlings.
I pollinated all the following, we will see if I get any pods. I have already seen a few bee pods on some plants so I should have at least some seeds to plant. Actually I planted two seeds from 'South Sea Enchantment' yesterday.
Crosses With Happy and Blessed 06-26-2017 9:30 am
16 Dips
Hot Wheels
Gentle Shepherd
Champagne Elegance
Carlotta
Beautiful Edgings
Blue Moon Rising
Bonnie Corley
Janice Brown
Jolyene Nichole
Laura Harwood
Mini Pearl
Missouri Memories
Nagasaki
Orange Velvet
Peacock Maiden
Radiation Biohazard
Gypsy Rose Lee crosses, Tet.
5 Tet.
Buttered Popcorn, Tet.
Jay Turman, Tet.
Mister Lucky, Tet.
Paper Butterfly, Tet.
So Many Stars, Tet.
ACCENT ON STYLE Tet. CROSSES, 06-28-2017
29 Tet.
All Fired Up, Tet.
Apple Tart, Tet.
American Freedom, Tet.
Buttered Popcorn, Tet.
Chesapeake Bay, Tet.
Chicks Dig It, Tet.
Circle of Beauty, Tet.
Ed Brown, Tet.
Finally Letting Go, Tet.
Fooled Me, Tet.
Gypsy Rose Lee, Tet.
Jay Turman, Tet.
Julie Newmar, Tet
Kissed Off, Tet.
Long Stocking, Tet.
Ming Porcelain, Tet.
Mister Lucky, Tet.
Palladian Pink, Tet.
Paper Butterfly, Tet.
Passion For Red, Tet.
Petticoat Frills, Tet.
Peru-B-Baby, Tet.
Rainbow Candy, Tet.
Red Apparition, Tet.
Red Volunteer, Tet.
Ruby Spider, Tet.
School Bus, Tet.
So Many Stars, Tet.
Spacecoast Tiny Perfection, Tet.
The daylily that I ordered back in the early spring but was left out of my order because the tags had been misplaced arrived today. 'Take Me Along' came with five fans and it had the bloom that allowed the ID still clinging to it.
'Take Me Along' finally planted in the garden.
Still getting rain...great for the new grass but some of the plants are starting to get a little rebellious. Enough is enough they say!
I decided today was the day to finally decide that some of my crosses from Hemlady just were not going to germinate. There were six crosses that did not sprout a seed.
I had planned to leave the seedlings in their cups, but when I checked on them today some of the cups were getting very brittle and most of the plants had roots starting to go past the depth of the cups. So being the bottoms were cut completely out of the cups, it was easy enough to just push them from the bottom and out the wide top.
I made a new list of all the seeds that developed into seedlings and there were still nineteen. So I put them all in alphabetical order and assigned a number to each of them. Now I will be able to easily keep track of them. Just putting a number on the labels saved me a lot of trouble, should have done that to start with instead of writing out all the crosses on the cups.
