Ginny, with all your daylilies, what a great place to start hybridizing.
The reason we collect and hybridize daylilies is because my son Ashton had such an interest in plants and how new plants were created. He was only 8 years old when he started. Now 11 years and 1100 registered daylilies and 11,000 + seedlings and a few registrations later, he is still dabbing pollen and selecting seedlings and selling plants. And dad does it with him.
The only thing you need to know to start out:
This is all easy and on a small scale you don't even have to make that much work of it. You already have the plants and gardening work so adding some seed crosses is not much more.
Know your Tetraploids and Diploids - and use same ploidy for crossing.
Learn a little about pollen to tell if it good = fluffy golden yellow. (if you dab enough you will get seeds)
You don't have to mark your crosses but if you want to know what you did and what worked, a simple method with a small marker and a log of what marker = name of pollen parent. We use colored paper clips. (and add small colored beads since we use a hundred + pollen parents) very inexpensive 250 multi-colored clips =$1 400 multi-colored beads $1.
you get pods
sometimes you miss
Legend: Diploids
Pink = Fired Green Tomatoes
White = Windswept Morning Angel
Yellow = Tiger on the Mountain
Legend: Tetraploids
Pink = Linda Sierra
White = Hook Echo
Yellow = Cool Bananas
The best way to keep them interested is to get them involved at different times and seasons of the garden. Show an interest and be excited about what is going on and anticipate and look forward to what will come from your experiments.
Grandpa was the gardening influence on Ashton. Grandpa only collected and enjoyed the flowers. Ashton was first to try crossing and pollinating.
Now he tells people: "They grew daylilies in my family for 60 or 70 years but I was the first one to hybridize them."
What did we do in our garden today? planted seedlings and made new tags to mark them.
