Seedfork's blog: Cutting back daylilies........Aphids by the thousands........12-14-2016

The rye grass I planted is now starting to show, soon there will be a lot of green grass in the front to mow. It has rained quite a bit lately, we had an all day rain yesterday, slow mostly with an occasional down pour.




I have been wanting to get out and trim the daylilies back for some time but there was always something that seemed to take priority over that chore. I was down in the garden the other day, and I noticed that 'Jolyene Nichole' had formed a mat of dead leaves. I have read that some people like to leave this mat of dead leaves to help protect the plants during the cold freezing winter temperatures. Here, in my zone 8b garden, we don't have a lot of freezing cold weather so I decided to remove the mat of leaves. I was shocked to find that there were hundreds if not thousands of white aphids hiding there. I cleaned the plant up pretty good and then sprayed it with some soapy water and decided then that it would be good when I had the time to clean up all the plants and check them. 'Jolyene Nichole' is a dormant and I for some reason decided that it would just be the dormants that formed mats of dead leaves and so the dormants would be the only ones infested with the aphids. So, I printed up a list of all my dormant daylilies, nearly 50 of them, more than I thought.
I forgot to take "before" photos, but here is a small bed that shows a good example what the daylilies looked like before they were trimmed.



This morning I selected one bed and decided I would do what I could to get that bed cleaned up then move on to the others later and I actually did manage to clean up that entire bed. It was not just the dormant daylilies that were loaded with aphids, there were very few of the daylilies that were not hiding tons of the little buggers down in the center of the plants. I started out by using scissors and trimming the foliage down to ground level or below for the dormants, and just picking the dying leaves off all the evergreens and semi-evergreens. As I worked my way down the rows I discovered that at this time of year for some reason the foliage is much easier to pull off than it is during the flowering season. I realized it was much easier to just reach in with my hands and pull all the dying and matted foliage off, then trim the remains with the scissors. I mixed up a couple of gallons of soapy water and then sprayed all the trimmed plants, hoping to get rid of the aphids and also to help combat the rust from getting a head start in the spring.
This is a photo of the one bed I finished:

The dormants pretty much ended up looking like these:


The evergreens looked more like this when I was finished, some got cut back a lot more.

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