You and me, both! Every day is a new experience that begs another day for explanation.

Lefty and Lorn, that's my mantra!!

Lol touché. You guys crack me up though. I just hope to someday be at the level of you guys on here. I know as with anything experience is the best teacher.

What did I do today (and for the past several weeks)? Two labels in the lily garden, one for Nutcracker and one for Nutmegger, except only the "Nut" portion showed above ground for Nutmegger. So I have been collecting stem bulbils from both and and tossing them in a little bowl with the label 'Nutcracker'. I just discovered this mistake today.

Guess I will have to plant all of them, lol!

pardalinum said:What did I do today (and for the past several weeks)? Two labels in the lily garden, one for Nutcracker and one for Nutmegger, except only the "Nut" portion showed above ground for Nutmegger. So I have been collecting stem bulbils from both and and tossing them in a little bowl with the label 'Nutcracker'. I just discovered this mistake today.

Guess I will have to plant all of them, lol!

Oops! I guess you will!

At least you know they can only be one of two cultivars.

You know, I was wondering where my Nutmeggers had gone ... I looked all over the place for them and finally figured I had lost them. You just can't find Nutmegger any more, at least that I know of. So I see I have two stems that have yet to bloom and confirm their identity. I received and grew them out from bulbils that were shared with me.

pardalinum said:... Two labels in the lily garden, one for Nutcracker and one for Nutmegger....

Well that was a lesson I learned quite some time ago...
- Lilium parryi
- Lilium pardalinum
- Lilium parviflorum

- Sedum obtusifolium
- Sedum obtusatum

And I've come across a few more problem childs like that, too.

Now I feel better.

I saw nutmegger available from someone not too long ago. Don't recall if it was valley k, the lily nook, or Ramona from faraway flowers

My bulbils came from Ramona as freebies with my order. She knew I was interested in it.

Just checking in on this last day of summer 2016. I was going to spend some time outside today digging up plants to move around and making room for plants still waiting for a permanent home in my new yard but it looks like the weather isn't going to cooperate. Probably just as well as my body is telling me it has had enough and I need to rest up a bit despite the dwindling days of gardening opportunities. I did manage to get the last full load of plants stuffed into my car and transported from my old home, praying all the way that no highway patrol would stop me for plants overflowing into my vision line every time I turned a corner. I looked like I was wearing some sort of bizarre old lady hat from a couple of lily plants that just had to much spring in their stems yet!
Our daughter's wedding was this weekend and it was a beautiful outdoor, country wedding complete with chickens, children and fall foliage at it's peak. I was quite overcome with all the love and generosity this community has shown in so many ways to my beloved family. It was quite an affirmation of our decision to finally move back home.
I just picked up the mail on my way in the house a few minutes ago and there was my September issue of the North Star Lilly News. I am taking that as a good sign!

Amazing how some lilies act! Started since early spring, these seedlings of L. Majoense have had one to two true leaves and stayed put, just surviving. In the past month they have looked more vibrant and thrown out a bunch more leaves!

I was wondering how those were doing for you, Joe. Thanks for the update. That seems to happen with a lot of Chinese species: they look so much better once cool weather returns. The few L. papilliferum that stayed through the summer really perked up and with another leaf, too, and a couple more underground seedling bulbs resprouted.

Waiting to see if the rain will hold off today. Then I'm going to add 20 feet to my raised lily bed, lay some cardboard down and put the soil on top.

I don't want to hold up your project, but I would rethink putting cardboard down as a base in a raised garden for lilies, or at least put the subject to open discussion. Cardboard decomposes very slowly and until it does it will act as a barrier to upward percolation of moisture from deep below during very dry periods. It is a large significant amount that most people would find hard to believe or even imagine, the amount of moisture that is percolated upward everyday when soil becomes dry. Another negative is that it would disrupt earthworm activity that prevents them from transporting material from the very lower levels to the higher levels of the soil. I'm not sure how the anchor roots would react to a layer of cardboard, with all the nitrogen it would consume during decomposition and all the amount of salts, P and K, that it would collect and hold. These salts are hydrophilic and would only enhance the cardboard's ability to hold even more water. And the last thing we'd want to do is create a super wet, soppy environment anywhere near the basil plate during an extended wet Spring season. Especially one who's soil chemistry is chemically out of balance. There may be a change of pH at this lower lever also, but that would not interfere with feeder root functions.

Rick, do you have any thoughts on this? Maybe I'm seeing things only my way again. There must be some advantage for some, because I've heard of this before.

What you say make sense Lorn. I was told that clean cardboard, not with tape and printed pictures, breaks down fairly quick but acts to kill the grass and weeds below it before fully decomposed. But I'm open to others input. Obviously I want what is going to benefit the bulbs over picking stray grasses that might come up or weeds. Thank you Lorn. I'll wait to see what others think before I fill the area in.

I have used cardboard in my gardens for years (at least 15) in both Minnesota and coastal Alaska and never had issues with it. The most frequent way I have used it is directly on top of the lawn (overlapping the edges by several inches) then cutting through to put my plants directly in the ground, placing mulch over the whole thing to cover the cardboard. Most often I have done this in the fall after a move or some reason that I have to get the plants in the ground before winter hits. I have also done it sans plants to create new garden beds for spring planting the following year by piling up mulch or compost on top of the cardboard. The cardboard is still usually intact it can take at least several years to break down. In coastal Alaska where it is very wet and raised beds for warming the soil and drainage is key for gardeners, I use it at the base, cover and build up. The cardboard had a lot more biological activity going on (mushrooms and fungi) the first year though it also may have been due in part to the seaweed that made up a large proportion of the total volume since soil was hard to come by. I have also in a pinch left a cardboard box intact, filled with soil and sorry looking daffodils and tulips left in a back room of a store and forgotten about left over the winter next to the regular raised beds. In the spring as the snow uncovered it, tore back the sides and tossed extra soil on top. I couldn't believe that the experiment worked. The landlord used pictures of the garden to help advertise the other rental units.
I cannot remember if I ever used the cardboard in raised beds for lilies specifically or initially...for certain I have had lots of lilies in almost every garden over the years but they very possibly were added later. I can say all though it has worked well for me for years (and I am in the process of doing it again in a shrub border at our new home), it is a pain to plant through the cardboard cut outs. Over all I would prefer to in some but not all cases to cut out the sod, using traditional double digging but it has never been possible for me. Prior to using cardboard as my base layer, I used thick layers of newspaper. That worked wonderfully well and the worms went crazy in those gardens. The newspaper layers decomposed so quickly though that I always had to pull back mulch and reapply more newspaper. Through the winter some newspaper always managed to get exposed and in the spring would break off and blow around the yard. One year I was foolish enough to try landscape fabric in one of the gardens. That was a disaster! After maybe two years I ended up pulling it all up and redoing the garden with cardboard covered mulch. It seemed like not enough moisture got through the landscape fabric (yet weeds did) and the plants failed to thrive.
I would suspect that the cardboard would probably work just fine for your proposed raised bed if you think through your local gardening conditions, climate and the type of lilies you want to grow there. However, based on reading all of your previous posts, the dedication and direction of which you are pushing yourself with lilies, I hesitate to recommend it especially for a critical expansion of your beds. Through the years I have often been accused of being a fanatical gardener but in truth it is more a matter of being a prolific gardener. I have learned much from my successes but more from my failures.

Yes, make sure you have plenty of input from all angles. Another thing I've heard that people use is barrier cloth on the bottom. But I also heard that ends up being a real mess when you go to digging and moving plants around. And, I've also heard of people spraying Round Up a little ahead of time but don't know how that worked out for them. I've always been a little afraid of Round Up even if it is being tied up in the soil since the scales are basically genetically modified leaves.

The problem of a perched water table came to my mind right away. It would be like growing in pot that is only as deep as where the cardboard is. If you treat it like a big pot (including using a lighter soil mix), you'd probably be okay. But I assumed the cardboard would decompose quickly and it wouldn't matter much anyway. Now I see that the cardboard could last much longer, due to several problems that could manifest. The reason for slow decomposition is the lack of a good environment for soil organisms that perform decomposition. I would guess that the lack of oxygen is the limiting factor. (That's why people turn their compost piles.) The tape and printed pictures with the cardboard is a simple a soil contamination issue, like if you get compost with plastic in it that came from shredding the plastic bags of lawn refuse that made the compost. It looks bad, but really doesn't impact growth much (in moderation, of course).

The capillary action of moisture upward from below as the surface dries, is huge. It's free and clean water, so you won't be using so much tap water, too. - not so high pH, and no added contaminants like fluorine, chlorine and such.

For that initial weed control, yes, you need to do that if the weeds are perennial. This is a good place to use Round Up, in my opinion. It won't move in the soil, up or down. The Round Up is bound so tightly to soil particles that even roots can't extract it, and certainly not bulb scales. This is the reason why above ground parts absorb Round Up and below ground parts don't: it's not that a particular part of the plant is necessarily more (or less) vulnerable, it's that if RU has the opportunity to bind with other particles first, it will. So if you had clean roots (no soil), they would absorb RU just as easily (actually more easily) than clean leaves. That's why it is stressed to use clean water when mixing RU. Dirty water will reduce its effectiveness because the RU will bind with the suspended dirt, and become, in effect, inert.

Something to keep in mind always:
Every time you change or do something contrary to the natural, there will be consequences. Look beyond the mere outcome that you perceive as desirable. Sometimes it's all good, sometimes not, but usually it requires a change in management of some other aspect(s).

I have over 30 raised beds with veggies, daylilies and lilies in them. I used Round-up to kill off all the weeds a couple of weeks
before filling them with dirt. Some weeds had to be sprayed twice. Everything has grown great. The depth of the dirt is 8 inches
over what I sprayed. Hope this helps.