Lessons from Daylilies: 1. Bloom Where You Are Planted

It started innocently enough in March of 2006 when we bought 4 daylilies from BADS, the Bay Area Daylily Society at Greenfest.  Shortly after that, we found that the Central Florida Hemerocallis Society was having a daylily sale at Leu Gardens in Orlando.  We came home with about 40 varieties. About a month after that, we drove up to Brooksville to Johnson's Daylily and Bamboo Farm, and the owners, Jeff and Linda Johnson invited us to a picnic the next weekend.  Little did we know at the time, it was the annual end-of-season picnic for BADS, and we met most of the club members and became members ourselves. Well, I did anyway.  Jay mostly sat outside in the shade under the cypress trees in the daylily garden.

Jeff and "Lori Goldston"

Over the next year Jay came to a few meetings with me, and we started to become friends with a few of the members.  When the club invited us to go to "Mecca," the annual pilgrimage to the East Coast of Florida where a majority of the daylily hybridizer "royalty" resides, we went along.  We saw some gorgeous commercial gardens as well as beautiful private daylily home gardens.  Now Jay is the President of the club and I giggle about that almost every time I think about it.  We are currently gearing up for the club's 18th annual show and sale.

Watermill Gardens, 2007

We've had our ups and downs with bloom success, and have learned a lot about what daylilies like (chicken, mule and cow poop, sun and water) and don't like (tree roots).   This  has been our best bloom year yet.  We have about 110 named varieties in our yard, and are foster-parenting about 50 plants left over from the BADS sale and show last year. 

Swirling Spider

Most of our named cultivars are in 3 raised beds that Jay built, and the rest are in pots by the house.  We have about 50 unnamed seedlings (affectionately called The Bastards) and two or three unidentified (lost tag) plants as well. 

Two beds and a coop

Friends who dabble in hybridizing have shared their seedlings with us.  It's always fun to see one  of these bloom for the first time - knowing that you're seeing a flower that nobody else in the world has seen.  The science behind hybridizing is really fascinating, but we haven't started trying to do it ourselves.  It requires much more record-keeping than either of us has time or inclination to do.  We like that it's fun and not work.  I'm afraid that hybridizing would make it more of a work project.

Some of our favorites have come all the way from Merrymeetings Daylilies in New Durham, New Hampshire.  They were hybridized and grown by a dear man named Les Turner, and have given us some of our most beautiful plants this year, now that they are well established and happy in our warmer climate.  Here are a few of the outstanding Merrymeeting Seedlings this year.  We are probably going to enter them in the show in the Seedling category.

MMS Seedling #2

 We've shared many of these seedlings with neighbors, family and friends, and all of them have produced beautiful faces for people to look at in the spring mornings.






This yellow spider is so fragrant you can smell it when you are 8-10 feet away from it.  It looks a lot like two other cultivars named Boney Maroney and Lemon Madeline, but is actually bigger than they are, and has more 'diamond dusting' on it. (This is daylily geek-speak for being all sparkly on the petals.)

MMS Seedling #5

Every morning, about 6:30, Jay and I head out to the garden in our "yard shoes" with our cameras in tow to see what is blooming for the first time that day and to ooh and aah about how pretty everything is.  We probably have 100 pictures of the same place in our garden, but each one is slightly different depending on what has bloomed that day.  Jay walks around with a bowl and picks off all the dead flowers from the day before while the chickens putter around and chat to one another. When it's time to go in, all the spent flowers go into the coop with the girls, and they munch on them for their morning snack.  This is the only thing that gets me up on my own, excited about morning.  The rest of the year I'm highly resistant to the concept of daybreak.

We're both so grateful for the beauty and friendship these little plants have brought to us.  Some of our closest friends are 'daylily people.'  The plants also teach us to be appreciative of individual beauty, and to be tough and patient.  As pretty as they are, they are really resilient little guys, and will perform their little hearts out if given the chance.  Next weekend is the show.  It always hurts my heart a little bit to cut the flowers to take in to be 'judged.'  As if one is more beautiful or more deserving than another.  Mother Nature knows what she's doing, and it seems arrogant to me to put one flower up as a paragon of beauty, when, like people, each one is probably doing the very best it can do under the circumstances it's been placed in.

Garden Update

Echo Canyon

Red Hot Ad

This is our favorite time of year in Florida.  Spring.  That all-too-brief 3-4 weeks of not-too-ungodly-hot, when we can spend time outside in the yard with the chickens and harvesting food from the hydroponic garden, and best of all, see our daylilies blooming.


We are having our most successful bloom season ever. Our club show and sale is on May 7, and we're hoping to have lots of blooms to pick from to take in for display and judging.  We've already had close to half of our approximately 110 different named varieties bloom, and many of the unregistered seedlings (affectionately called The Bastards) have bloomed prettily as well.

Dark Wonder

Jay at Greenfest

Jay at Booth

The daylily season started out at the Annual University of Tampa Greenfest, where our club sold nearly all of the 450+ plants we had on hand.  Jay is always a hit at the sales tables, turning on the charm to sell the bloomers off the slightly-older-than-us ladies.

Swiss Chard

The hydroponic garden has been doing really well.  We do have some empty containers to fill, and the catnip is going nuclear like it always does, but we've been eating Tatsoi and Swiss Chard most days, and giving it to the chickens as well.

We've harvested two of the cutest little Yellow Pear tomatoes I've ever seen, and have been enjoying strawberries for a few months.  The cucumbers decided to take off in the last week or so, and it's about time to eat the cabbages since the nasty grasshoppers have discovered them.  At least the squirrels will be denied the tomato harvest this year, thanks to The Cage surrounding the area.

Phyllis, Sylvia and Pearl are  doing well, and enjoying the extra outside time that the weather and Jay's surgery recovery has allowed.  Their favorite thing to do is take dust baths underneath my kitchen herb garden.

Peace, Love and Yarncraft

Manos Del Uruguay

I'm a Crafty Woman. Some of you might be surprised by that but it's true and official. My friend Terri invited me to join her Crafty Women group.  We meet once a month and everyone brings their crafty projects - crochet, knitting, beading, etc.  At my first meeting in November, Rose and Meg put a hook in one hand and some yarn in other and now I'm hooked.  (get it? Crochet? HOOKED!)

I haven't really tried to tie in (get it? Yarn? TIE IN?) my newly-acquired yarn-craft obsession with my blog until the group held a yarn swap. It was a lot of fun seeing what everyone brought that they didn't want anymore, and that there was a home for everything.  I was sifting through the pile looking for natural and sustainable fibers and scored HUGE with about 5 or 6 skeins of Manos Del Uruguay cotton yarn produced and dyed by hand in a fair trade non-profit collective whose mission is to bring economic and social opportunities to rural women.  I have no idea what I'm going to make with it, but I love that I got it for freesies and that it's the kind of fiber I can feel good about working with.  That got me thinking...what else could be 'green' about this hobby? Turns out a lot.  I plan on doing a series of posts about the greener aspects of yarn craft, starting with projects to help me keep our house 'green.'

Ann's Peace Sign Dishcloth

Terri's Watering Can Dishcloth

My first crochet and knitting projects were dishcloths.  I've made a dozen or more since November.  Dishcloths are a great way to learn to do basic stitches, and to learn how to be consistent with tension.  I like making my own, and giving them to friends.  I've gotten a little obsessed with knitted pattern dishcloths, and have had a lot of fun collecting patterns that 'belong' with different friends. (so everyone act surprised if you get a dishcloth.)

Swiffer Sweater

I also made some 'Swiffer Sweaters' to use instead of the disposable cloths that go on the bottom of the Swiffer-like floor sweepers.  I had bought some micro-fiber ones a few years ago, but had fun making these myself.  They work well, too.  I like that they are quick to make, and take very little yarn, so I can make them out of smallish bits of leftover yarn from other projects.

Bags for Rounds

Cotton Rounds

Next, I found a pattern for re-usable cotton rounds.  These are like little pads that can be washed and used over and over instead of buying those flat cotton pads for removing make up and washing your face.  I made some bags to put them in, and keep the clean rounds in one bag, and used ones in another.  I just toss the whole bag full in the washer when I run out.  I made a set for my friend Natalie, and included a soap sack as well.

Finally, I made an iPod Touch case for my friend, Jenn.  I think it turned out really cute.  I found a button made of reclaimed wood to hold it shut.  I've got loads of ideas now about how knitting and crocheting can be part of a 'green' lifestyle.  Be watching for future posts!

 

Cari-d Away to Callaway

 Every other year or so in December, we bundle ourselves up in multiple layers of our warmest woolies and drive up to Callaway Gardens in Pine Mountain, Georgia for some winter wonderland fun at their Fantasy in Lights event.

 The resort starts putting up light displays throughout the park in September, and it takes until around Thanksgiving to install all 8 million lights.  After sundown, you pack up into open-air Jolly Trolleys and are driven through the park to  see all the displays.  I won't show you any of my pictures that I take at night because they never turn out, but you can see them on Callaway's website.  The two pictures above are ones I took of two of the displays the next morning on our drive.

our cottage

The resort has many options for lodging.  We usually get either a cottage or a villa lock-out (when someone rents a 3 bedroom villa but only needs two of the rooms, we rent the third at a significantly reduced rate).  This year our cottage overlooked part of the 10 mile bike trail.

Butterfly Conservatory

The morning following the light show, we have breakfast in either a country style restaurant or the new restaurant in their Lodge and Spa building, then we tour some of the garden sites.   There is the Ladybird Johnson Wildflower trail, the location of the Southern Victory Garden and our favorite, the Butterfly Conservatory.

Inside this glassed-in structure are literally thousands of butterflies - over 2700 the day we were there, according to the Butterfly Count board.  There are butterflies hatching in a display, and then once you walk into the humid tropical enclosure, you see them everywhere... flying, feeding, just hanging out.  It's a magical place.

ladybugs

We walk around in this lush indoor garden, looking all around at the butterflies that are on plants, feeding on fruit, walking around on benches and windows and even landing on people.  There are even hundreds of ladybugs, part of the garden's practice of using natural pest control methods instead of chemical pesticides.  Ladybugs LOVE aphids, so having them hatch out colonies of the little red and black buggies help to control the aphid population on the host and feed plants for the butterflies.  We do the same thing in our yard every year, too.

the hatching display

feeding tray

greens and cabbage

Next we moved on to the Victory Garden.  The resort employs 6 full time gardeners on the 7.5 acre plot. They grow veggies that are used in the in-park restaurants, and they also sell the excess to park guests.  Of course while we are there in the winter, all that's really growing are collards and cabbages, but my gardener's eye could fill in the blank spots that I'm sure come spring and summer are filled with all sorts of produce.  The park gardens also serves as a testing ground for new varieties, and also employs natural and 'green' growing practices to treat pests and diseases, should issues like that arise.

There is an herb garden as well as a sundial garden, and some really nice shady spots that I'm sure are welcome in the warmer weather.  They film some of the PBS Victory Garden tv show episodes from there.  We always say that 'next year, we should come back and see the park in the spring or fall when everything is blooming' but so far we haven't. I'm sure that when the azaleas and rhododendrons are in bloom the entire mountain is swathed in rosy pink and fuschia.

Jay on the victory garden porch

This is one of our favorite places to go, and I can heartily recommend it to anyone in need of something to get them in the Christmas spirit.  We've talked about spending Christmas there, treating ourselves to the spa and sipping cider by a roaring fire...Maybe next year will be the year we actually try out those bike trails and see actual wildflowers growing on the wildflower trail, and actual veggies in the veggie garden!