Sue
I completely understand your position as people living up north are at the mercy of the weather. I well remember a summer in my Michigan garden where snowflakes were coming down on the 4th of July and we wore our winter parkas to go out on our boat to watch the fireworks. That year, everything in my garden had extremely low bud counts, practically no branching, and the "season" passed in a few short weeks as there were so few buds to bloom. So it is not your imagination that things were not like this last year...your plants probably were better branched and budded last year. Living where you do, increase can be poorer, as well...you can lose parts of plants each winter that leaves you thinking that a plant looked better last year....it probably did. Without keeping meticulous records you would not realize that you have half the fans that you had last year because you still have a plant growing in its spot.
I thought that moving out of Michigan and into the Mid-Atlantic would solve these weather related problems. It did to some extent. I get wonderful increase here from a longer growing season, and I no longer lose parts of plants. But there are still weather related issues that go to branching, bud counts, and scape height. I keep meticulous records of every promising seedling...recording scape height, branching, bud count, and bloom diameter every single year from the time a seedling first blooms thru introduction. This is very hard work but part of the evaluation process. This year has been a confusing and difficult summer. I've been doing my measurements in the last few weeks....some plants are exactly the same year after year and others seem to be at the mercy of the weather and measurement ARE much different than last year. So some plants are held back from introduction for another year to see if the changes that I saw this year are permanent or not as I don't want to introduce a declining plant. I don't think many people who buy daylilies even know the work that takes place in a hybridizers garden to bring high quality plants to market.
So my opinion (for all it is worth) is that you do put off doing "plant reports" during a particularly difficult year until you have accumulated data over a number of years to see if you have given the plant a fair assessment.
