Anticipation

It’s that particular time of the season again … the time where the daylily beds are just loaded with buds; thousands of them, some just emerging and others growing longer and fuller every day. You can almost feel the energy of blossoms close to bursting open, and the anticipation is delicious. Every morning we start the day with a walkabout, looking to see which of the earlies has opened; there have been several so far, but most of the bloom is still a week or two away.

Along with a few hundred registered varieties of daylilies, we are growing hundreds of daylily seedlings planted from seeds produced after two varieties crossed. Each of these will be a new genetic combination, technically a daylily never seen before. Waiting for these seedlings to open their first blossoms creates a somewhat different kind of anticipation; it’s like opening Christmas presents – maybe you have some idea of what it’s going to be, but then again, it could be a complete surprise. And it might blow you away, or be a dud! And whether or not it shows a pretty face is just part of it, although certainly the most eye-catching part.

It takes several years to truly evaluate a seedling. Will it increase well? Does it have a good bud count and branching? Does it hold its blossoms above the foliage? Can it cope with dividing and transplanting? We have seedlings in various stages of these “tests.” Some of our 2008 seedlings have passed very well and have joined the ranks of varieties for sale this year; after four New Hampshire winters, and one or two moves to different beds, they’re clearly hardy and reliable.

Will we ever register them? Well, maybe … and maybe not. Registration is costly and time-consuming, and really, folks, it doesn’t guarantee much of anything, as far as I can see, especially for a small-scale nursery like ours. The performance of registered varieties I’ve purchased over the years has been all over the place: most have thrived beautifully, but some were lackluster and underwhelming in terms of vigor and numbers of blossoms, and a few simply disappeared after their first winter here. It’s much more important to acquire varieties that are tried-and-true in your climate zone and/or region.

And how can you know that? – not by shopping at big garden centers that import their plants from far away, but by purchasing from local growers. When plants are field-grown, it’s fairly obvious; when they’re in pots, ask questions: did you grow these yourself? If not, where were they grown? Were they overwintered in a greenhouse? (this means that you can’t be sure of their hardiness) How many years have you been selling this variety?

Even better, visit other gardens and see what’s thriving. Ask for plant names and take notes (I’ve got my little daylily notepad with me at all times!). Trade plant divisions with friends. Go to local garden club plant sales. There are plenty of ways to fill your gardens with a variety of beautiful, hardy daylilies that will delight you for years to come.

Brewing Better Blossoms

We all know that daylilies are one of the easiest-to-grow, most carefree perennials out there. But like almost any other plant, the better the soil they’re in, the better the growth … meaning more blossoms, which is the whole point, isn’t it?

The old-fashioned orange fulvas (aka ditchlilies) clearly grow all over the place without anyone tending them at all – no weeding, no fertilizing, no watering. But hybrid varieties usually do not thrive with total neglect.

Perhaps you’ve already got yours in good soil. Perhaps you mulch them to retain moisture and discourage weeds. Terrific! They should do very well.

But here’s one small and easy way that you can make them even happier.

Are you a coffee drinker? (I’ll bet most of you are) Do you throw out those used coffee grounds each day? Don’t!!

Those grounds are wonderful fertilizer for your garden, full of nitrogen, which promotes green growth. Sprinkle them around the base of your daylilies instead of tossing them into the trash. Particularly in the spring, your plants will love it … not only daylilies, but hostas, lettuce, kale, Swiss chard, and the like. Blueberries, too, appreciate the acidity of coffee grounds.

We make a full pot of coffee each morning; the grounds get put into a 2-quart container, and when it’s full -- maybe once a week -- we take it outdoors and distribute the black gold. By the time the daylilies are blooming, we start adding the coffee to the compost pile instead; it’s no longer time to encourage leaf growth as much, but rather shifting over to root growth for next year’s scapes. The cycle starts over again as soon as the snow is gone in the spring, putting the grounds right on the garden beds.

So share your morning cup with your daylilies! They'll love you for it!

Daylilies for dinner?

The American Hemerocallis Society is a great source of daylily information. Whether you're a member or not, you can sign up for their free monthly E-news newsletter at http://www.daylilies.org/ENews.html (sorry, I can't seem to get links to work properly on blogger lately!)

I'm reprinting here an article from the latest AHS E-news about edible daylilies ... and will confess that I've never eaten them myself. Yet. The blossoms are just too beautiful to pluck and eat! Perhaps I'll try it this year with some of my least-favorite varieties ...

Question: We are organic farmers with a permaculture food forest in Santa Barbara. We would like to include daylilies in our designs and wonder if anyone knows which are the tastiest daylilies (buds and petals).
RESPONSE: I love this question because whenever I give a presentation about daylilies I talk about eating them, and everyone is amazed. I used to own a restaurant and before the evening meal, I would go home and pick some daylilies and use them in the salads. It was wonderful for interesting conversation.

It sounds as if you already know that daylilies are edible. But for those readers who don't realize it, they are delicious! Dr. Darrel Apps, a talented daylily hybridizer, reported that he encountered a wide variety of food products made from daylilies, including sugared daylily flowers, in a shopping center in Seoul, South Korea. The islanders told him that they dig up shoots and eat them like asparagus in spring and then eat the buds and flowers later in the season. This information and other fascinating facts can be found in one of my favorite daylily books called The Delightful, Delicious Daylily by Peter Gail.

One can buy bags of daylily buds and flowers in many Asian food stores in the U.S. Or you can harvest your own. We have a friend who went out every night and picked the daylily flowers and let them dry out. Then in the morning when he made himself an omelet, he would throw some of the dried petals in. He said it was not only beautiful but also tasty and healthy.

You asked about the flavor. The fresh buds have been compared to green beans and asparagus. Since flavor is influenced by scent, the more fragrant daylily cultivars may taste sweeter than those without a strong scent. It has been said that dried daylily buds have a mild beef broth flavor. Dr. Apps reports that red flowers are bitter, while the yellow, orange, and pastel flowers are not and are the tastiest.

In the late fall and early spring the white tuberous roots are crisp like water chestnuts. By scrubbing the roots and slicing them, they can be used in stir-fried dishes instead of water chestnuts.

Daylily buds and blossoms have almost as much protein as spinach, more Vitamin A than string beans, and about the same amount of Vitamin C as orange juice! The flowers are good just buttered and simmered.

The recipe in The Delightful, Delicious Daylily is so simple for buttered daylilies. You just take 8 daylily blossoms, 1 cup chicken broth, 3 tablespoons butter, and salt and pepper to taste. You simmer the daylilies for 4-5 minutes in the chicken broth. Drain, then add butter, salt, and pepper, and serve! Are you going to try it??

Some people do warn about potential disadvantages of eating daylilies. Eating too many fresh daylilies can create a mild laxative effect and raw green buds may cause throat irritation. If you collect daylilies from along the roadsides, they could be contaminated by automobile pollutants and/or herbicides and might cause upset stomachs or other problems.

Have fun experimenting with eating daylilies. It is delightful to try them out with your friends and neighbors. My favorite method is simply adding a fresh daylily to a salad and watching people to see if they have the "nerve" to eat it. More information can be learned from the following book: The Delightful, Delicious Daylily by Peter Gail Goosefoot Acres Press P.O. Box 18016 Cleveland Ohio 44118-0016

Oldies but Goodies

It’s hard to say what’s worse: soldiering through a typical winter of unrelenting snow and ice, or this particular one that teased us for weeks with bare ground, fairly mild temperatures, and then dumped 8-10” of snow on us just as we were seeing the beginnings of spring growth. My patience is taxed either way, but right now I am as antsy as can be, itching to get out in the garden. Fussing over seedlings and houseplants is all that’s available right now.

It’s also the time of year to update our daylily website, which somehow inevitably leads to looking at lots of other daylilies online, which somehow inevitably leads to ordering more. This can be a dangerous way to feed the garden appetite, I’ve learned, as it lends itself to impulse buying without the near-immediate gratification of a package arriving within the week. It’s much safer to just look at the pretty photos and make wish lists -- but that sometimes requires more self-control than I possess.

As time goes by, I’ve found that my eye is drawn over and over again to the same daylilies in my winter explorations; often they are ones I already have, but it’s a good way to really notice which colors and forms appeal to me. With over 60,000 different daylilies out there, it can get terrifically overwhelming! – sometimes when I am standing in the middle of a large nursery, surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of varieties, I can feel paralyzed and nearly unable to choose.

Lately I’ve found that many of the varieties that catch my eye are the antiques, or heirlooms. Here are two of the new ones I’ve ordered:
Rosy Wren, introduced back in 1961 …

… and Crazy Lace, a Wild intro from 1966

Some of our favorites in our collection are the “elders” of the garden. The one we call Cape Cod Cousin is probably Black Prince, dating back to 1942, but we lost the registration …

And Abstract Art (65) always takes my breath away …

Catherine Woodbery (67) is a classic

… as is Frans Hals (55)

Heirloom Lace (63) … who knew there were these kinds of ruffles back then?

And Miss Jessie! We just love this one that goes back to 1956

Prairie Moonlight (65) always stands out in the garden

The photo at the top of the post is Radiant Greetings. I've had this one for years; it dates back to 1975, another one from Wild, maybe not an antique but already 37 years old.

Sure, the newer, splashier daylilies have their charms, but these oldies have stood the test of time, hardy and graceful and beautiful in their simplicity. And, as a bonus, because they’ve been around so long, they are usually a lower-cost way to expand your daylily collection.

Fifteen days until spring!

Hardier than we knew ....

A few weeks ago, when I took last summer’s daylily seeds out of the refrigerator to add absorbent paper and moisture to them in order to break their dormancy, I found a little plastic envelope of seeds from the previous year, hiding behind a jar of jam. It’s not unusual for things to get lost in our fridge; the unusual thing is that these seeds had sprouted last winter … and were still green, a year later.

It was clear that the growing shoots had sucked up all the oxygen in the bag, because it had that flattened out/shrink-wrapped look to it. My first thought was that they would probably die very quickly once removed from the bag, but of course, there was nothing to do but experiment!

So I prepared the moist planting mix in a pot (my vessel of choice is always a recycled yogurt quart container – a half-dozen seeds fit easily, you can make drainage holes in the bottom, and there's plenty of room for roots to grow) and then quickly transferred the shoots into the soil. I didn’t expect much, frankly; put the pot near a south window, and that was that.

Within a few days, those shoots started growing, much to my amazement. And here they are, two weeks later – growing very nicely – so far!

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.