Well, I have been struggling with the daylily hybridizing thing. Just could not seem to get things together...what was I missing? Finally it struck me how simple this should have been all the time and how complicated I had made it. It was really pretty simple, I did see it in the video...I just ignored it.
With experience I will get much better at it, but it does take learning a lot of little things that make all the difference. It was one thing to see everything presented in the videos, it was something quite different trying to put all that together in the garden. I am sure my neighbors must have been amused and puzzled by my Crazy Ant like motions up and down, back and forth , here and there all over the place in the garden.
I think the one thing that finally simplified the process the most was just writing the pollen parent initials on the tag and not adding the pod parents initials. I will add the pod parent initials when a pod is actually set or when the seed are actually harvested. That does not sound like much of a difference but it makes the process flow instead of stall.
Also having the plant markers showing if the plant was a Dip. or a Tet. was super helpful. All the lists I made and assigning Initials before hand which took a lot of work did help a little, but was not necessary.
Plus a few daylilies:
Who knew? It couldn't take that long. It looks so simple!
Well, I am finding out as I undertake doing some daylily hybridizing that it can take up all your time, not some some of it. It all depends on how organized you are...I guess that lets you know I am a long way from being organized like I need to be.
I watched a video on You Tube several times, it is by Dan Hansen and he is showing how he hybridizes. It was a lot of help to me, but I had to watch it a few times to get the captions along with the voice instructions. He did a good job but still with my mind, it left a few things unclear.
He suggested what type of tags to get and showed how to fill them out and attach them to the daylilies. I did go to Office Depot and buy 500 tags the size he suggested. Now you would not think that it would take any instructions on how to fill out a tag and tie it on, but I found out differently. The pollen parent is listed at the bottom, the pod parent is listed at the top. After fumbling around with the tags I watched the video again...put you finger though the loop, pull the string taught then put the TAG around the bloom pull the TAG through the loop and pull it tight. I was trying to put the string around the bloom and it is much easier the other way.
Now I watched Dan mark the labels down in the garden in the video, so I did the same. But, I ran into a problem. The tags naturally are small, so it is necessary to abbreviate the names when filling out the tags, put I was using a normal point permanent marker, and not a fine point as suggested. I did buy a fine point marker, but left the lid off and it dried up. So...I was marking and tagging when I realized that with all the daylilies I have many are going to have the same short abbreviations if I just use the first letter of each word in the name as I was doing. That could get confusing.
So I got the smart idea of typing up a list of all my dayliles and assigning abbreviations to each one, great. But a couple of hours later my eye balls were blurred and my fingers tired from all that typing and I still was not nearly finished. I finished my list this morning and rushed down to the garden to try out my new abbreviation list out. Naturally it was not long before I found I had missed a few, I will double check the entire list tonight, but I just added the missing ones as I ran across them. That method was not working for me, it was taking way to much time trying to go down the list and find the abbreviations then write out a tag while trying to hold everything in my hands. I also ran into another problem as I was making my crosses , everything was going fine as long as there was only one bloom per plant, no problem. But what if I wanted to pollinate more than one bloom per plant. That was not a problem if I was making the tags as I did each pollination, but I found it much easier to make the tags inside where it was cooler and I could write at the desk so my hand writing was legible. So how to tell which bloom went with which cross? I decided on a system of pulling of one sepal for the first cross, pulling two for the second cross and pulling the third for the third cross, that was my limit.
I know I am not doing this the best way, not even a good way right now. Just way to inefficient. I will work on this some more, I think maybe the most important thing that I missed even though presented in a very obvious manner is that I need to select my pollen parents first. Stick with just a few, maybe three or four a day I think I will try that next and see how it works.
Well I have run into another problem recently also. When I am in Chrome and click on upload an image, by screen goes blank, then I have to reload the page, and the cycle continues. I have no problem if I exit and go to a different browser. Something to work on. I will try adding some photos later.
I had to be gone from the garden for a few days, then after one day back I had to go for Jury Duty, now I have that for one more day in may and one more day in September. We have had so many doctors appointments this year I hardly know if I am coming or going anymore!
But yesterday and today I have had beautiful weather and a lot of time in the garden to try and get caught up with things. I try to keep some data on my dayliles and that is made difficult when a day or two is missed, things change so quickly now with them. Hard to keep up when scapes appeared and when the first blooms showed up. Still I have done much better with that than I was able to do last year when we had to spend so much time with my wife's sister.
The Azaleas have long gone, the roses are not very productive this year except for the Knock Outs and the small climbing red rose on the fence. The Amaryllis have made their major appearance, but I will have some blooming on and off normally almost till fall. The dayliles are now the star of the show, the hosta varieties have been depleted(I need to stock up on some new plants). Glads are now just starting and the ferns are taking over some of the beds they have grown so well this spring.
Here are some photos of what is happening in the garden:
I went down to office depot and bought 500 tags to put on my daylily crosses and just did my first ones for the year today. Not doing any cross of real interest, mostly just trying to figure out a simple routine that is more efficient than how I am currently doing things. It seems to take me forever just to do a few crosses. It will be better when I get all my plant labels marked so I can tell dips from tets. I hope to finish that up today sometime. I will put an asterisk on the tet markers, nothing extra on the dip markers. I spent time while I was away looking them all up and now have a list of all the tets and dips.
The big news...I bought a new boat! The truth, it is a tiny peddle boat. My wife has wanted one for years, and now we have one. My neighbor was actually given one by his parents, then by mistake the company sent them a second one. The company told my neighbor to just keep the boat, as it was not his fault and the shipping and handling would be too much I suppose. There are three small lakes (ponds) in the subdivision so I will have some nice spots to use it. My neighbor kept the first one and sold be the second one he received for $350.00. It has been too windy for the past few days to try it out, maybe later in the week.
Mine is actually blue and white but it did come with the cloth top to help keep the sun off.
https://www.sundolphin.com/ped...
The daylilies are putting out a lot of scapes and even a few blooms now. Up over a 120 with scapes and maybe half a dozen with blooms so far including NOIDs and some seedlings along with the named varieties.
The new blooms are not opening up very well because the nights and early mornings are still pretty chilly, but I think starting Saturday the low temps should be back up in the high fifties again.
A few photos from around the yard:
Ok, I guess I can say spring has arrived. My new definition of spring: When the first daylily scapes appear!
So out of over two hundred named cultivars I now have what was the first one to show scapes? Yes, as usual it was a NOID.
Planted four more rows of daylily seedlings in Bed three today, I think that will about finish my seedling planting for the year.
