Natalie said: I grew up in the East Bay, so I know how odd the weather can be there. Hopefully you'll get a decent winter, for what it is worth there, and I'm sure your daylilies will be fine. They really are tough.
It is much warmer here this morning, at 22 degrees! The wind chill is 13, so I'm locking myself inside again, but this feels like a heat wave after the last few days!
Wow... One thing about Idaho, the daylilies have no trouble telling when to sleep. I really prefer a dormant daylily, because of the yearly renewal, but our new home is on a slope with a southern exposure, so the soil probably stays a little warmer than our old place in a winter-shaded canyon. We had ice on the rooftops and windshields this morning, so it looks as if the seasons are back on track for a while.
In the winter of 1990/1991(I think) we had a freak 5-day cold front settle in, with 18-22 degree nights, and 35 degree days. No one had ever seen anything like it here before. Water pipes were bursting all over town. In one entire subdivision, a the contractor had installed budget water pressure regulators with a plastic spring cover, and as soon as they thawed, they were popping like Orville Redenbacher's. Of course, most of the people had no idea how to turn off their utilities, so emergency services ran all day. Fire protection sprinkler piping installed in attic spaces was bursting and flooding businesses and apartment buildings—it was a situation that no one ever thought would happen here.
lovemyhouse said:We have odd swings, here, too, and the Daylilies haven't seemed to be affected. Pretty tough plants, all in all.
You're right, they seem to carry on in spite of nearly everything. Whenever a scape gets damaged or some other mishap occurs, I recall a Virginia Peck quote I read in an old Daylily Journal, "The daylily will have its day."
In the fall of 2013 I put in a Gossard bed with 9 plants. Right next to that clump of
Dark Monkey , there's a two-fan plant of
Black Panther. It's probably one of the daylilies I think of as being "photoperiod dormant", because it went underground around Thanksgiving with no coaxing from the weather. Both fans had bloomed and rebloomed during the growing season, but because of the rain it now has two scapes about 18" tall. Weird.
Ken
East S.F. Bay Area
USDA Zone 9
