I just came across this thread and I'm so glad I did because I have the same question(s). I'm gearing up to plant some of my daylily seeds indoors to give them a bit of a jump start to the growing season, not to mention a couple of sprouted-the-pod seeds forced my hand in early planting, so I already have one seedling I'm struggling with how to name.
My biggest concern was whether or not there are certain maximum numbers of alphanumeric digits permitted in seedling categories at daylily shows or anywhere else. The reason I all is because the naming convention I was planning to use was:
YYmm.ffNN
...where YY was the year of pollination, mm was the pod parent, the dot just means 'crossed with' (some of my daylilies have 3 letter designations, so the dot would help separate the pod/pollen parents in that case), ff was the pollen parent, and NN is the seedling number from that cross.
@polymerous , your post was EXTREMELY helpful in many ways and you brought up an interesting point about the benefit of not knowing the cross when you look at the label so that you can judge the daylily on its own merits. I'm struggling to determine for myself if that's something I want to do, too. With some seedlings, I wonder if I might want to keep them because they might be carriers of a recessive trait that the patent is displaying because what the phenotype doesn't show, the genotype might. Hmm...
