It's still a long ways off ...

… but oh, my, it feels like spring out there this morning. We take the dogs out as soon as the sky begins to fill with light, and once again the early morning temps were above freezing. Most of the gardens have just a thin layer of snow, and one of them is nearly clear. The birds are singing, the air feels hopeful. This is January?

The new USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map is out, reflecting the climate changes we’ve all been experiencing. Here in the shire, we’ve been bumped up from 5b to 5a, a +5-degree difference. While this sounds like increased opportunity for growing daylilies that had only been considered marginally hardy before – and that may be true – it’s become obvious that climate change is more than just increased average temperatures. We’re now seeing the predicted increase in major “weather events” of increasing severity – droughts, torrential rainfalls and flooding, record-setting heat waves, extreme snowfalls, an alarming increase in the number of tornadoes and severe thunderstorms.

There’s a corresponding shift in the gardening world to xeriscaping, or selecting plants that have low needs for water and can withstand dry spells. Daylilies are pretty tough and resilient; those thick roots hold onto moisture, and the plant can take a good amount of less-than-ideal conditions. I have a friend who pulled a daylily from her garden some years ago, deciding she didn’t like it, and tossed it onto her compost heap. There it sat during a long New England winter (the kind we used to have!), and the next summer, it caught her eye – blooming atop the compost.

Nonetheless, daylilies are at their best with regular rain or irrigation. That’s when their blooms will be the most abundant. Here in New England, we have the occasional dry summer, but fortunately (so far) we more commonly have plenty of rain during the growing season. It may be time to start thinking about rain barrels and grey water, though, especially in communities where the use of outside faucets is sometimes curtailed. Those increasingly common reports of prolonged dry spells and dangerous heat waves in other parts of the country sound pretty alarming to this gardener, given that we really don’t know how climate change will continue to play out here.

Sow Your Own! -- Part Two

Did you save some daylily seeds last fall? If you followed our earlier Sow Your Own, Part One instructions (posted on the gardenfarmer blog on 8/13/11), you’ve had them tucked away in your refrigerator for about five months now. They’re ready to be slowly awakened from their long winter’s nap, sort of like the Sleeping Beauties of the daylily world. You get to play the part of the Handsome Prince.

Daylilies come in three broad types – dormant, semi-evergreen, and evergreen. Dormant seeds need the benefits of stratification and soaking in order to germinate, more than the other two types. Stratification simply means chilling, in this case; and soaking is a bit of a misnomer – we just want to give them some moisture. (Interestingly, dry chilling does nothing to promote germination, but does preserve the viability of the seeds over long periods of time.)

So first, assemble what you need: hydrogen peroxide, water, some sort of absorbent paper – paper towel, coffee filter – and, if you have one, an eye dropper is useful, but not necessary.

Fill a small bowl with water and add about a teaspoon of hydrogen peroxide to it.
Next, cut or tear the absorbent paper into small pieces, perhaps 1-inch-square.
Place a piece of absorbent paper into each little seed bag; then add an eye dropper full to the paper to moisten it.

No eye dropper? – you can dip the piece of paper into the water/peroxide mixture, then place it in the seed bag.
A word of caution here: you are not trying to SOAK the seeds – don’t add too much, or they may rot! The goal is to just add moisture; if we can get technical for a moment, the moisture increases the permeability of the seed coating so that the embryo inside is exposed to oxygen, thereby stimulating germination. Soaking them reduces the exposure to oxygen – rather counterproductive, hm?

Back in the fridge they go. Research shows that four to eight weeks at temperatures between 32 and 50 degrees Fahrenheit is optimal – and isn’t that convenient? Your fridge temps are probably right smack in the middle of that range. Or at least they should be!

At the end of that time – which, since I just moistened my seeds today, will mean mid-to-late March – the seeds will be ready to plant. Some will have already germinated, others not visibly yet. Stay tuned for Part 3 in March.

new year, new blog

It seemed like a good time to create a just-about-daylilies blog. The one that used to be linked to the Dhabi's Daylilies website -- gardenfarmer.blogspot.com -- is still out there, and I'm still posting there too, but over time it seems that most of the gardenfarmer posts were about all manner of things not related to daylilies.

If you're looking for any of the older daylily posts, they're still on gardenfarmer; perhaps, if I become smart enough, they'll get copied over to here, but I wouldn't count on it ;-).

Please leave a comment when you visit, even if it's just to say hello ... it's nice to know you were here!

Dhabi? What kind of a name is that?

Six years ago -- almost exactly -- I became a grandmother. Now I know there are some of you out there that have experienced this rite of passage just as I did: on the one hand, I was totally blown away by how much I loved this little one before I even laid eyes on her; on the other, total shock that I could be old enough to be a ... a ... grandmother. Not possible!

And so, like lots of others of a certain age, the question became, what shall I be called? Grandma, Gramma, Nana and the like didn't appeal to me, nor did the male counterparts suit my husband. Time went by, and our dear little one began to babble away. At some point it became clear that she was calling me something that sounded like Dhabi.

Hmmm, I thought; I like that. Dhabi. And if I'm going to be Dhabi, my husband can be Abu. Abu Dhabi. Perfect for baby boomer grandparents in denial, don't you think?

I hesitated before calling our daylily business Dhabi's Daylilies; would it look unpronounceable? too strange? too hard to spell? But then, I'm not trying to create a megabusiness here, not trying to take over the daylily world or become an online giant. So Dhabi's it was.

And this leads directly to two of our daylilies with names that sound even more strange: Waddu Dhabi and Waddu Abu. More baby talk? Yep.

"Waddu" was her early attempt at "I love you," and it made our hearts so happy to hear her chirp, "Waddu, Dhabi!," and "Waddu, Abu!" Of course she speaks perfectly well now, but we always get a chuckle out of remembering those funny toddler times whenever someone asks about those daylily names.

Carmine Monarch