Deadhead party

No jerry Garcia was not here, nor was Bob Weir, or any of those guys. The Grateful dead did not play here but the "morning dew" was all around. We did have a dead head party, but not that kind of Deadhead party.

What we call deadheading is all about removing the blooms from Friday so that they aren't hanging and mushy the next day at our Open Garden for the visitors to see. Every year on the evening before the Open Garden, we start at one end and move to the other end picking off that day's blooms. The picture shows you what it looks like after you've walked through a garden with hundreds of daylily plants blooming their heads off and removed every bloom, piled them in the wagon for disposal. It is a tough job, but someone has to do it.

What would you do?

I don't get very many chances to do hybridizing as the flowers are just beginning to open when I leave for work. On big bloom days though, I come back home for an hour or so, if I can, and dab some pollen. Alison usually leaves the "diploid" hybridizing to me. Diploids are flowers with the correct number of chromozomes. The majority of daylilies in the trade today are called "tetraploids" they have two sets of chromozomes. I digress. So there I was yesterday, standing in the garden, pollen in hand... what should I cross??? The pollen I had was from a spider type called 'Skinwalker,' pictured left. It's registered at 9.5 inches in size. As I stood there, a devilish thought crossed my mind... "do it... do it..." it said. So I did. And I didn't stop there. What I did was to cross it with every miniature I could. A "Mini" is the smallest size category of daylily, less than three inches in diameter. Not only did I just cross it to minis, but to this mini-double (below) called 'Micro Dots' registered at 2.875." Who knows what will come of it? A mini spider? An extra large double spider? A big pink/orange mess? Time will tell... if it makes any seeds that is. That's the beauty of hybridizing with daylilies, you never know what you're going to get!

Call us weird, but we get excited about our seedlings. We were happy enough that we bloomed 'Maret,' (pictured below) one of the darkest red/purple daylilies that we have ever seen, and happier still that someone saw it and purchased the naming rights for it last year in a fund raiser we had for the Africa Mission. I can speak for myself (Craig) when I say that we were just plain beside ourselves when we bloomed two progeny of 'Maret' this year. This is my favorite of the two but not by much. If I can find a pic of the other I will post it.

Got Maret?

Well, we're one week and one day from our Open Garden and things are looking good. It is always hard to predict three months out which weekend will be closest to our peak bloom. Peak bloom is the day when the most number of varieties of daylilies are blooming. We have more than 350 varieties and on the day of peak bloom we have generally had around 210-225 varieties blooming. One year, 2006, we hit it within one day. This year, beacuse of the cool spring, the bloom seems to be spreading out over a longer period. Yesterday we had 163 varieties blooming; some are nearing the end of their bloom period and there are many that have yet to start. If I had to predict right now, I would say about Tuesday June 24th would be peak.

Our hybridizing is coming along nicely. Alison spends most mornings in the garden dabbing pollen on pistils, making tags of what she has crossed, and checking for pods that have set from the previous days. We have acquried several very new, cutting edge varieties (by purchase and trade) over the past three years to accelerate our hybridizing and we are blooming our first efforts from that and I hope to post a seperate blog on that in the next few days. Although I dare not speak for my wife, Alison seems to be working heavily with full formed flowers that are green edged and heavily ruffled, as well as some with patterned eyes. I like to work with reds, and those with unusual characteristics like streaks, doubles, bicolors, and highly contrasted colors. Sometimes, when Alison sees what I am hybridizing, she will howl like a coon hound. This is to signal to me her belief that what I am hybridizing will turn out to be what is refered to in the trade as a "dog." A dog is a flower that has muddy color, spotty or blotchy, bland or just plain ugly. I just respond with "You never know." I get to do very little hybridizing however since it is best done in the mid morning hours when I am at work.

This little gem, named 'Maret,' is one of eleven seedlings that we have been bringing along that, last year, several friends paid for naming rights by making a donation to our Africa Mission to Sierra Leone. For $100, interested folks got to select a flower from our seedling beds and tell us what they'd like to name it. Mr. Tom Sinemma named it after his grand daughter. I really need to post a blog for those to. My favorite name of those submitted was 'Downtown Millie.' As I recall, it is a medium red with a dark red eye and petals that curl back to a point. Another of those named seedlings is on the upper right of this page. It is a stunner that is named after the village where we go in Sierra Leone for our Mission work, 'Taiama' and is pronounced "ti-AM-uh."

Home of the Whopper

Came upon this seedling in the garden today. It is from a cross we made about three years ago. This is the first time it has bloomed for us and the ruler is there for scale. To be considered large flowered a bloom has to be at least 5.5 inches in diameter. This one easily exceeds the dimensions for extra large and is in fact considered an Unusual Form. The coloration isn't anything to write home about but i'll be keeping it just because it is our first WHOPPER!

Meanwhile, we continue to get ready for the upcoming Open Garden. Our annual Open Garden event was begun as a way to not only share our garden with folks in the community, especially our fellow Master Gardeners, but also as a way to show just how big the world of Daylilies has become. Daylilies have come a long way from the "ditch lily" and the "Stela d'oro" with which everyone has become familiar. Two years ago we decided to make a fund raiser for the Africa Mission that I am involved in to Sierra Leone, West Africa and the attendance exploded. Last year we had more than 80 folks turn out and raised more than $1100! This year, thanks to an error in the Paris! in the Summer magazine, it looks like we will be having two dates! I submitted our Open Garden to their events calendar originally for the 21st of June, but then when I called to change it to the 28th... well, it was so long until publication that... hmmm, somewhere, somethign went wrong! Guess we'll be having two!?!