Once you fertilize a flower, how do you mark it so you know the parent plants when a seed pod forms?

I wrote a bit about this in a previous article. I hope it helps! I like to use USB wires or jewelry wires, as shown in here:
http://garden.org/ideas/view/D...

Thanks! That was very helpful. Would embroidery floss work?

Good question. I'm not really sure since I haven't tried it. I haven't used embroidery floss since I was a teenager, so it's been awhile, but I think my main concern is the colorfastness of particular colors. Between the sun and the rain, you may run into quite a bit of fading, but I would say its worth a try. Start off with colors that are very different from each other (such as turquoise, dark purple, red, yellow, etc...). They aren't likely to fade within just a few days, so if you *do* start to notice fading, you should have time to correct the situation and come up with a different solution. The trouble is remembering to switch out ALL of your 'tags' if you change the pollinator that tag represents.

I use colored paper clips. I use small for diploids and large for tetraploids.

I use pipe cleaners found in the craft departments. They bend easily and take several years to fade.

I'm still rockin' it old-school, with fine-point sharpie markers on Avery 1" x 3/4" marking tags. They're paper tags with fine cotton string.
Product #Avery 12207

There's no fading, and I only write the name of the pod parent when I actually harvest a pod, so they're reusable for about 6 tries, unless you can re-use already marked tags with the same pollen. If you're organized enough to be able to designate a wire color for a certain pollen, then they can be re-used many more times. I get three seasons out of most of them.

The disadvantages are; they're not exactly inconspicuous, they occasionally get moldy, and slugs/earwigs sometimes enjoy munching on them.

My summers are dry—the mold might be more of a problem in your climate, but many hybridizers use these paper tags throughout the country.

Paper clips and pipe cleaners might be best. Houston can get moldy. Today I overheard people complaining about a water bottle design that kept getting mold in the tip.

Colored paper clips here, but with the warning that by the end of the season, red, orange, and maybe even pink clips can all start to look alike.

I've found it helpful to have clips in two sizes (regular and xlarge), clips that are striped (you can get these in small quantities on Amazon; use them only for parents you will only be using a few times), and clips that are metallic colored (as opposed to the dull vinyl coating). I do very few dip crosses, and I know which plants are dips anyway, so I use both size clips for whichever parents I wish, making the assignment based in part on how many crosses I expect to do with a particular pollen parent, and how many clips I have of which sizes and colors. I may also use the same color and size clip for both a tet parent and a dip parent, because I know there will be no confusion (I am not putting tet pollen on dips, and vice versa). So a regular sized white clip, for example, may indicate either 'Newberry White Dove' (if the pod parent is a dip) or 'White Wolf' (if the pod parent is a tet).

Sometimes there are so many different pollen parents in play, that I run out of individual clip assignments. At that point, I start using two clips, firmly clipped together, to indicate a pollen parent. So, for example, white alone might be 'White Wolf', but white and pink together might be 'Arctic Lace'.

Finally, I largely gave up on using paper tags, because the snails were eating the marker writing off the surface of the tag! (Plus, those paper tags are just very much in-your-face and unsightly. ) But I recently bought some, just in case there are some good seedlings this season that need crossing right away.

I get some neon orange and a dark purple at Staples and so far they haven't faded. Red usually only last me one season. I get a lot of the striped ones also and use them in combination with the solid colors.

We use the paper clips and I wish I could give you details but there is more than one coating used for the colors. We have an original round 6 color (600) pack that we have used for 3 years and the colors are just as when they were purchased.
Embroidery floss should work as long as your colors hold in the sun and weather. We have used all the ways listed on here to mark crosses. We use more parents than most people so the paper clips offer enough colors for lots of different pollen parents. We also repeat the same color and color combinations for dips and tets.

For new hybridizers, here is an example of our legend for diploids. We will have another legend for tetraploids using the same colors.

Hybridizing legend: Dips

Blue =Little Swirling Shadows
White = Little Mucha Minto
Yellow = #230 seedling
Green = Blue Flirt
Red = RFK
Pink = #4 Seedling
Yellow/Yellow = Little Surfer Girl
Pink /Green = #218 seedling
Blue /Red = LW Calico Blues
Pink /Pink = Colorful Etchings
Red /Red = NW Dancer
Green/White = W.Morning Angel
Blue/White= Little Blue Angel

My method involves more time, I think, and probably no one else would
want to do it because of that. At the most I believe I've made around 5000
or more crosses this way. Of course, that covers a few years.

I cut surveyor's tape into small strips, like to use green so it blends with
the garden. Mark pod, pollen, and date with a painter's pen, and tie it on
with my old stash of yarn cut into strips. The date added tells me when
to begin looking at pods for maturity in about 30 days. The labels
stay with the pod, and are then transferred to pots when seeds are planted.
A hole is made on the rim of the pot to tie on the label. Labels are still legible
when we plant seedlings in the ground the next spring. We discard the
labels each year, and begin the process all over again.

I do this because I use so many different combinations of pod and pollen,
and is easier for me to keep up with. Hybridizing, for me, is experimentation.
I want to see the results of crosses as to what may be dominant and recessive
traits in various combinations.

Edited to clarify.

Terry - Who manufactures your paper clips? I've had problems with the ones I use (concerning fading). It could be the sun is just more intense here, but am curious to know if you are using the same or a different brand.

Thanks for all the ideas. I have about 20 named DLs and am experimenting at home to make sure everything "works" before trying the whole process at school with my students. Even though they don't bloom the first year, I think daylilies are a good choice for the classroom because the parts of the flower are easy to see and easy to fertilize. The seeds are big enough for little fingers to plant and they are hardy enough to survive not being watered as much in the summer when everyone is on vacation. Daylilies are far more exciting than a bean seed in my opinion.

Tabitha - I totally agree with you about growing daylilies at your school. Now the real fun comes if you do hybridizing and have the students try to come up with theories on how the seedlings will look given who the parents are.