I have a big patch of nice Daylily in a spot where it is becoming clear it is not practical to defend them from deer. They also are way overdue for splitting, even though hey never flowered before this year.

I want to try to pull out about half the fans from there and put them in a spot that I think will be safer from deer.

For various reasons, this would be an easier project if I do it after my Hay Scented Ferns go brown, but before the Daylily do. I don't think I recorded anywhere what point in the season ferns go brown (though I recall it is before most of my perennials), and I haven't been aware of the Daylily before. So one of my questions: How should I estimate when they will turn brown? (so I know when/whether to give up waiting for ferns to go brown and do the transplant anyway).

I will be taking them from a difficult spot: lots of big tree roots intertwined with rocks just below the surface, so when I dig out a fan or more, most of roots will be left behind in the gaps between those rocks. I think that means I should be aiming for fewer and larger chunks than I would under better conditions (more width to make up for less depth). But I'm unsure.

I will be moving them to a different difficult spot (very steep slope). So I will have issues holding them there until the roots start to recover, plus other issues, such as needing to mix some coarse organic material in, so water can sink in before it runs off down the slope.

Online sites said to cut the leaves to 2 inch or 4 inch (depending on which site I read) tall for transplanting. Is that a good suggestion?

What else should I plan for and/or have on hand? What fertilizer, etc.?

Or is the whole plan doomed?

I always cut mine back to about 4" when I transplant. I prefer to move daylilies in early September when weather starts to cool. I have done it in July/August, but be prepared to water often, like any perennial. I would add compost, but not sure about fertilizer in the fall. I am sure you will get more suggestions, and from people more experienced than me.

The transplant seems to have gone better than I would have expected. But it still looks like I made mistakes and could do better this fall, so I could use more advice.
I really like the look of this unidentified daylily (as compared to the named ones I bought a few years ago from Costco). Here is a photo from last year in the source location, just before the deer ate all the buds:


I aimed to dig out the middle half of that patch of daylilies, leaving a quarter on either side. But rocks and big tree roots blocked the pry bar I was using and the middle third came out surprisingly cleanly but without an easy looking way to get a larger chunk.

Possibly I should have divided the chunk I took out. But there were so many other challenges involved and I'm not very skilled at this, so I decided the clean chunk was more likely to recover quickly if planted as is. There was a big bare spot in a steep slope where I have been working at growing ferns for many years. I dug a much deeper and slightly wider hole than the chunk needed, because the rocks and clay I was removing seemed like bad things to surround the transplant. I filled the excess mainly with very old semi-decomposed wood chips. I was a bit surprised to hit zero underground structure of ferns while digging, because I thought the nearby ferns would have pushed rhizomes into the bare area. That chunk now is much taller and slightly denser than the parts left behind. It looks to me like it is too dense and I should have split it when transplanting:


Also I was surprised that the ferns came in so close around it, where there were no fern rhizomes there in the fall. Also notable, there is a new bare patch in the ferns directly down slope from daylilies. That probably means those decomposed wood chips are sucking in all the water that otherwise would flow down slope there, so the patch below the day lilies is drier than surrounding areas. None of the fern issues are directly serious, just things I noted.

The parts I left behind look like they nearly filled the missing middle. But I think it isn't really true. I noticed last fall that many of the fans aren't really where they appear to be: They emerge from the ground, turn 90 degrees away from the crowd, extend a short distance horizontally between the ground and the mulch, then turn 90 degrees to come up out of the mulch in a different place than they came out of the ground.



I think I have better deer defense this year than in the past (won't know until these are flowering). But I'd still like to move more of them away from this spot this fall. That is the aspect on which I could most use advice.

Any guess at why the fans seem to bend under the mulch away from the overly dense area in the original location, but don't do so in the new location? I would expect the boundary of decomposed wood chips around the transplant would have made it easier for fans to bend away from the crowd even before emerging from the ground.