(sub)Urban Farming

This is a reprint of my very first published article in the 2012 Spring Region 12 Newsletter for the American Hemerocallis Society.  I had never really thought I wanted to write for publication before, but I actually had a good time with it, and with writing the local club news article at the back of the issue. My apologies for the redundancy to those of you who have followed the blog.  If you know me, you already know all of this. But I hope you enjoy the recap!

When Greg Crane asked me to write a piece for the newsletter about “Chickens and Daylilies” I was, frankly, stumped. I’m a part-time blogger, and I’ve written about our chickens, and I’ve written about our daylilies on www.cari-daway.blogspot.com. But I 

never really thought about “Chickens AND Daylilies.”  A few weeks were spent with this 

concept rolling around in my mind, and more than a few attempts at writing that were actually spent looking at a blank screen and a blinking cursor. I asked the Facebook universe for ideas. My friend Timi said she understood my block by equating her being asked to write about her jeep and her dogs: two things she loves but don’t really intersect. 

One of our daylily club friends, Kyle Pierson, said that the feathers of the chickens could be like the colors in daylilies, or that going out to see the flowers in the morning is like looking for eggs. All are valid points. But nothing really lit my literary pilot light. I 

flirted briefly with the comparison of my hobby of collecting lists of potential chicken names (such as Magdalena Van der Flocken) with some daylily enthusiasts’ hobby of collecting lists of potential daylily names (I know you’re out there. Terri Jones can’t be the only one who does this!) Then it hit me: Poop! Yes, poop. Not literally, thank goodness. Put a pin in that thought, we’ll return to it in a few minutes.

I realized that the chickens were an integral part of the mini eco-system we’ve created in
our little neighborhood city lot. My husband and I both have green thumbs. I also have a
passion for healthy organic food and a clean environment that borders on the obsessive
(and occasionally annoying.) These qualities combined a few years ago into a 10-tower
hydroponic garden, a square-foot garden for my kitchen herbs and natural pest control
aphid-trapping bed, a worm composter and traditional compost bin, and our chickens:
Phyllis, Pearl and Francine. We also grow about 150 daylily cultivars. Small potatoes in
the daylily world, but when you consider how tiny our house and lot is, that’s about all
we have room for. I believe that in the chemical sense, one should impact the earth as
little as possible, but while doing that impacting, one should get as much out of it as one
can in the space allotted.

In the hydroponic garden, we grow enough produce to feed ourselves, the chickens, the
neighbors, my Pilates instructor, the girls at the local tea shop and sometimes our friends,
family and co-workers. The catnip grows especially well, as do tomatoes, Swiss chard,
onions, carrots, basil, snow peas, broccoli, cabbage, cucumbers, beans and many other
things. The ability to grow 6 times the produce in the same space as conventional
gardening appeals to me, as does the ability to do it without chemical pesticides,
fertilizers or fungicides that leach into the water table or harm wildlife. The only real
challenge we had was squirrels. Eventually Jay caged in the entire structure with chicken
wire, and that has kept out the squirrels, but continues to let in a tiny field mouse with
whom we’ve agreed to share. He doesn’t eat as much as a dozen squirrels do, so it seems
like a good balance. And the structure only looks a little bit like a prison camp….. but I
digress.

  Two years ago, Jay and I decided to get chickens. He spent about two months of
weekends and a spring break building a really nice coop. He is especially proud of its
door. In April of 2010 we brought home Babette, (who later grew into Bobette and had to go back to the farm) Sylvia, Pearl and Phyllis. Sylvia has since passed away, but Francine recently joined our flock. During the construction of the coop, Jay had dug up and potted all the daylilies so he’d have room to work without having to worry about tromping all over them in his many trips back and forth across the yard. When the coop was finished, he built two big (for our yard, about 8’ x 8’) raised beds about 18” high, to put all the daylilies back into. Here’s where the poop comes in. I told you we’d get back to that.

We – and let there be no doubt that when I say “we” it is all “Jay” - filled the beds with 

compost and bagged oak leaves we liberated from lawns and curb sides all over South
Tampa. But what really got the beds ready for replanting for the daylilies were the 

chickens. We finally got brave enough to let our very spoiled, indulged, coddled and
generally over-protected city chickens out of the coop to free-range every afternoon
(supervised closely, of course.) Jay tossed sunflower seeds up into the empty beds and the girls hopped in and started turning over the soil and, well, pooping. Poop = fertilizer = daylilies. Happy daylilies. 2011 was our best daylily season ever. The sunflower seeds in one of the beds did not get eaten as much as the other, so at one point we had a bed full of giant sunflowers with happy daylilies growing in their shade. When it became time to cut down all the sunflowers to give the daylilies room to grow, I dried the heads and gave them to the chickens. Poop = fertilizer = sunflowers = chicken treats = eggs + poop.

Every morning, Jay takes organic brown rice mixed with organic yogurt out to “the
girls,” and in bloom season he deadheads the daylilies and chucks them into the chicken
coop along with some Swiss chard, field-mouse-chewed tomatoes, or carrot tops from the
hydroponic garden. Since we don’t ever spray any dangerous chemicals in our daylilies
or in our hydroponic garden plants, we can safely feed them to the chickens. Poop =
fertilizer = daylilies + hydroponic vegetables = chicken treats = eggs + poop.

Since we have the chickens, and because I’m pretty militant about not spraying chemicals all over the yard that my chickens and invited wildlife and beneficial insects frequent, we do occasionally have to deal with uninvited guests such as aphids or sooty mold in the veggies that are in the squash family. This is where the worm composting and square foot garden comes in. Worm tea is a great anti-bacterial and insecticide that is safe to use in the garden. Gaura lindheimeri 'Whirling Butterflies’ is an aphid magnet. We plant it in a small square foot bed in relative close proximity to other plants that are aphid candy like daylilies or hibiscus, and the aphids glom onto the stems of the Guara and tend to stay off the plant we actually care about. Jay calls the stems “Aphid Popcicles” because I cut them off when they’re loaded up with aphids and feed them to the chickens. In the past, I’ve brought in ladybugs to then eat the aphids, but for the last couple of years, I just let the chickens eat them. If the aphids wipe out the Guara it’s not a big loss since they reseed like crazy, and are only $3 at the garden center. They’re cute, too. Worm tea + castings = Guara = aphid magnet = chicken treats = eggs + poop.

I bet you’re wondering now “What does she do with all that poop?” We make compost,
of course. And the cycle continues. We can use the compost to top dress the daylily
beds, and the butterfly garden, as well as supplement the Guara and my kitchen herb
garden. The compost bin is located next to the door that opens to clean out the hen house,
so I just have to scoop, turn and dump. Of course the garden and kitchen produce waste
that doesn’t get fed to the worms or the chickens goes into the pile, as well as eggshells
and tea leaves we pick up from a local tea shop and coffee grounds we get from Whole
Foods. It’s also located next to the fence by the neighbor’s yard, so they toss their kitchen waste into it as well.

Our chickens give us enjoyment every day, along with the eggs and poop we use to keep
our daylilies growing. Our daylilies give us enjoyment every day during bloom season,
and are good treats for the chickens. They do look a little like bloody dinosaurs when
they dig into a deadheaded blossom from a red cultivar, though. That can be a little
disconcerting. They love to take dust baths underneath my kitchen herb garden, and also
work diligently to keep down the unwelcome insect population in the yard. We rely on
our hydroponic farm to feed the chickens, and ourselves and compost whatever we can in
order to keep the cycle going. So there you have it. Chicken poop is the substance which
binds our (sub)Urban eco-system together.




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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.

Allow me to show you my bloomers

Ahem.  Now that I've got your attention...  Here is what's blooming in our daylily garden today.

I'm a garden geek.  People who barely know me understand that pretty quickly.  What goes even deeper than my love of growing things in general is the soft spot I have for the  daylily.  We actually don't grow any other plants that are this ornamental and non-functional.  I love that it's a different bloom every day, on a different plant every day, for several months in a row.  There is nothing like going outside first thing in the morning before it's so ungodly hot and seeing who is there to meet you in the garden.  Sometimes it's a double, like Affair D'Amour, or a spider like Chevron Spider.

                                                                                                                                                              

Sometimes it's a bi-color like Athlone, or one with pinched sepals like Cameroons.

This is our best year for daylilies yet.  I think the cold snap really gave them a break and let them rest up so they could put on a show for us this year.  Of course it wasn't in time for THE show, but still.  We get a private performance every day, and will until possibly September.

I can't take any of the credit for them being this healthy and happy.  Jay does all the hard work. I am generally the one who picks them out, and sometimes I point here or there, but in the last year I've been pretty 'careless' in my placement.
When we first started, I was SOOOO detailed and persnickety about making sure I didn't have two pinks together, and that I had the big ones in the back, and the earlies mixed in with the mid- and late-seasons.  As the years have worn on, I've realized that the tall ones don't necessarily bloom the same time as the shorter ones, so it doesn't matter (to me) if they're in the back or not.  I'm just happy to see each of them whenever and wherever they decide to come out and play.  I used to be very detailed in my tags, too.   At first, I noted the variety name, the hybridizer, year of introdution, height, size, season and genetic type.  The last batch we came home with got the name of the variety and hybridizer and the year of introduction.  I became less obsessive about the technical details and more laid back about them and just being glad they are growing and blooming.  If I ever want to dabble in hybridizing, the details will be important, but for now, knowing the name and the hybridizer is probably good enough.

We have about 100 named varieties and probably half again as many unnamed/unidentified or seedlings of unknown parentage (daylily bastards) as well.  Most  of them are in pots over by the chicken coop because they were in the yard near or in the same spot the coop was going to be, so we moved them into a shadier area during construction.  Another raised bed has only daylilies and the occasional weed.  Jay is going to build raised beds for all the potted ones so they'll get the benefits of more root room like their raised bed buddies. Once all of them have permanent homes, I'll do a good inventory and get an accurate count. 

We're also fostering about 60 plants left over from our show and sale.  With much luck, they'll be ready to sell at our booth at Greenfest next March.  Every time I think we're out of room and can't possibly get more, we come home from Greenfest, or our annual show, with a few new petal-y friends.  One I can't wait to meet is called Android Dreams, that one of my favorite people in the whole wide world hybridized.  It looks like rainbow sherbet.  Hand to God.  It's got a scape on it now, so in the next few weeks, we'll get to see if it's as happy here as it was in Plant City.  The spot where the recently-removed ficus trees is MUCH larger than I thought.  I be we could fit another couple hundred daylilies in there, but nobody would ever get to see them.

Daylily Silly

We had our annual Bay Area Daylily Society (BADS) show and sale on May 1.  We have the first show of the daylily season in the country.  Some of the people in our club are very proud of that fact.  Personally, I wish it was a week or two later in the month because we always get more blooms right after the show.  We've entered flowers for 4 years now, and have received ribbons for something each year, usually yellow, but occasionally a blue.  This year we did better, we got a purple, which is considered a "Major Award."  I got the giggles over that because it reminded me of the Major Award in the movie "Christmas Story" (remember the hideous leg lamp?)  Anyway, we got a Major Award for our daylily H. Pink Ambrosia.  My friend Timi said that 'Nothing Is Better Than a Leg Lamp" but I'm pretty tickled anyway at our purple ribbon. I actually like the flowers that we only got Red and Yellow ribbons for better.  They were H. Happy Hooligan  I like that cultivar better because it is speckled and a double.  Jay thinks it's ugly, though.

Sandy Soderberg won the Best Spider and Best in Show awards this year. She also won for Best Photo in the Single Flower category.  Sandy continues the 'St. Pete Sweep' tradition.  Maybe some day someone from the Tampa side of the bay will take home the top awards.  Maybe even someone from South Tampa.  Hmmm.. Now there's a thought.

As a result of my feeling really bummed out that we never have had more than 3 blooms to bring to the show, and feeling a little left out of the fun because the same people seem to win every year, I had a bright idea to also have a photo category.   Like in any club or committee, he who has the idea is suddenly put in charge of it.  Luckily three other very sweet club members, Kyle, Gayle and Terri were willing to  co-chair that section of the show committee with me.  Those of you who know me well know that I positively, absolutely hate being in charge of anything.  Yuck.  I'm really more of a sit-on-the-sidelines-and-provide-comic-relief kind of girl.  I'm not really management material.  You have to take things much more seriously than I do to be in charge of them.  I'm pretty good at having-ideas part, though.  I think we did really well for our first photo exhibit.  There were some bumps, but it all turned out okay.  We know more now, and have some good ideas to use next year if the club decides to keep the photo exhibit as part of the show.  I placed second and third in the Clump and Landscape categories, respectively.  Both pictures were taken at Johnson's Daylily Farm in Brooksville.  Pending Jeff and Linda Johnson's permission, I'm planning on doing a whole post on their daylily and bamboo farm in the near future.

I took some Flip Video of the show, with some fairly Blair-Witch-y footage of the sale in progress, the photo exhibit, and some of the flowers.  It can be seen on My You Tube Channel here.

Greenfest Success!

This weekend our daylily club (BADS) participated in Greenfest at the University of Tampa.  It benefits friends of Historic Plant Park.  A huge festival with plants of all kinds, garden art and other gardening-related stuff, Greenfest is, in my opinion, the best of all the Bay Area Gardening Festivals.  The Master Gardeners are on hand to answer just about any question a gardener could have, and there are speakers of all types.  The  City of Tampa Wastewater Treatment plant was even handing out free bags of locally produced fertilizers. (yes, bags of people-poo)  Our club gets a great location every year, under huge oak trees.  It's one of two yearly events we hold  to make money and educate people about our favorite flowers.  Jay and I love growing daylilies because they are fuss-free and come in literally thousands of varieties. It was such a beautiful weekend (until 2 PM Sunday) that we sold out of all but 4 of our daylilies before 10 AM Saturday.  We had to call members to dig plants and bring them so we'd have more to sell.  Two of our members from Plant City saved the day Saturday by bringing more plants for the afternoon, and two other  members dug and divided plants from Brooksville and Redington Beach Saturday night to bring this morning so we'd have enough to sell on day 2.  After such a horrible winter, Tampa gardeners came out in full force to replace all the plants that didn't survive this year's crazy-cold temperatures.  I hung my gorgeous daylily quilt that my mother- and father-in-law designed and made for my birthday in our booth, and it was a huge draw. A lot of people came up to the booth just to look at the quilt, giving us a chance to tell people about daylilies and sell some plants.  Thank you, Arlene and Ray!

It doesn't seem that long ago that Jay and I bought 4 daylilies from the club at Greenfest.  Now we're the ones working the club booth, Jay is the vice president and we grow almost 80 varieties!   As a way to advertise our show and sale on May 1,  I had the idea for all of the club members to save the Daylily Journals, Magazines and Catalogs that we all get during the year and put stickers with our show and sale information on them.  We handed out probably a few hundred of them to people who bought plants, so I'm hoping we'll get even more visitors to our sale this year.  The Tampa Rose Society is joining us at our show venue, so we should get more traffic from the 'rose people,' too.  I'm glad we found one more use for all that printed material.

When I wasn't in our booth selling plants and talking to people about daylilies,  I roamed around to see the other vendors.  The lady we bought our worm compost system was there (I think a post about our worms is probably going to be coming soon).  I spent the majority of my mad money on heirloom veggie starts and herbal teas.  I got 6 heirloom tomatoes of all colors, shapes and sizes, white and yellow carrots, a 3-foot squash, a purple and a 'chocolate' sweet pepper as well as herbs to round out the last 3 sections of my square foot herb garden.  One of the herbs I got was "pukeless" cat grass.  Only 1 out of 4 of our cats liked it, and it is (so far) pukeless as advertised.  I'm going to do a post soon about heirloom seeds, too.  It's so important (to me, anyway) to preserve the rare varieties and our food heritage. After this terribly busy weekend, we're finally going to get back to building the chicken coop next weekend.  We really need to get it done so we can bring order and bring home our peeps!