Cherry Hill Garden

A Complex Process? If you look through the 'helpful tips' shared on sites like Facebook for starting daylily seeds, you'll get the impression that it is a complicated process and apparently getting more complicated every season. Refrigeration, dormancy, peroxide, wet and dry storage, heat mats, pre-sprouted seeds, fungicides, and fungus gnats!   Some growers pre-sprout seeds in paper towels and then carefully tweeze them apart so as to try to not break off the roots or tops as they are placed individually into planting holes.  Some growers use heat mats or a large individual pot for each seed. Some growers start their seeds indoors in the fall under lights, and then have six or seven months of caring for seedlings before spring. Once they get tall enough to touch the lights, they get a 'haircut' with scissors. Some people measure out peroxide to add to the soaking solution.  Some growers transplant very small seedlings into bigger pots to give them 'root room

What is the best time to plant daylilies?  After the spring weather is settled in mid-May?  Any time they are actively growing?  In the fall after they go dormant?  From our experience, you may want to consider much earlier planting, say, around your last frost date.  We are zone 5/6 in west-central Indiana.  Most daylily growers wait until mid-May to ship to our area.  If they are Southern growers, they start shipping to the south and work their way upward, zone by zone, and our shipments are usually mid- to late May.  Northern growers wait until their weather is settled and the plants have good growth before shipping to us, also around the same time.  Both northern and southern growers are shipping actively growing plants,  with many southern ones showing developing bloom scapes or even already bloomed-out scapes when they are shipped.  Shipping requires the removal of most of the top growth of the plant to get it into a shipping carton, which goes along with the best planting practi

 Early on, we took the advice of the Morry family (Canadian hybridizers with a blog) and crossed Northern daylilies to Southern Daylilies to bring in hardiness from the North and add fancy edges from the South.  As our hybridizing programs matured, we quit breeding with Southern plants except ones that survive well here for us.  We are zone 6, sometimes 5, but with almost no snow cover with temperatures up and down all winter, and sometimes down to ten below, Fahrenheit. Many southern plants that survive further north (into Canada, zone USDA zone 4) with snow cover, don't make it through the winter here.  We have tired of losing so much time and money on southern plants and are now mostly adding only northern plants, as well as using our own material for hybridizing.  So, after 14 years of hybridizing, we can look back and identify the plants that have been the best parents in terms of passing on health, bud count, and a pretty face.  Here are a few of our favorite parents by othe

 In many plant families there are white-flowered horticultural forms around.  Roses?  Check!  Hibiscus?  Check!  Hostas?  Check!  Tulips?  Check!  Daffodils?  Check!  Carnations?  Check!  Zinnias?  Check!  Daylilies?  Well, there's apparently only "near white" and as most growers know, the near-whites are very pale yellows or very pale pinks.  This is pretty much true of many other plant families, but daylily hybridizers and growers are loathe to call a daylily 'white'.  Why? Check out Facebook and see some 'pink' daylilies. There are peach, salmon, rose, old rose, silver pink, puce, cerise...you get the point?  There are very few that are truly pure pink.  I hear about this often, since it is a pet peeve of Nancy's.  If you call it 'pink', it better be pink!  Are you color blind? Sloppy? Lazy?  That is SO OBVIOUSLY 'peach' and NOT pink!  "Pink" daylilies are very rarely pink. Look up descriptions and photos of 'red' d

 Use the most promising of your own seedlings In the 14 years we have been hybridizing, our focus has taken several turns and twists and at least one derailment. When we started buying, we didn't care if something was a diploid or a tetraploid.  We just wanted one of every color!  Three years later, after an eye-opening trip to Soule's Garden in Indianapolis, Nancy started us down the path toward creating new daylilies on our own. At first we were infatuated with teeth and creating more daylilies with teeth, so several years into hybridizing, we started to discard all the diploids we had collected.  We were going to create some toothy tets! Following our success at creating a beautiful toothy bloom on a plant registered as Rosy Cotton's Ribbons, we lost sight of specific hybridizing goals and crossed anything with everything. Looking back on our hybridizing records, we suddenly had no focus at all.  Progress with our seedlings really started once we focused on breeding with

 For us, one of the interesting aspects of 'getting into daylilies' was finding out that the growers have a tradition of adding bonus plants to an order. We have had the pleasure over the years of being introduced to a number of varieties we would otherwise never have experienced if they had not been added to our order by the grower.  It didn't matter whether they were given to us free of charge because they weren't a big seller, were an older variety, or the seller just didn't like them or they grew 'too well' for him.  Some of these varieties have been wonderful additions to our hybridizing program and others haven't excited us and were given away or even sold locally.  Nonetheless, it is a generous gesture for a plant grower to add a free plant to your order. It usually results in an immediate 'trip' to the daylily database online to see what we had been gifted. Bonus plants we have received over the years that have turned out to be serendipit

The other day, over lunch, my wife, Nancy and I were having a discussion about - what else- daylilies.  We wanted to head to the 'back 40', which is stretching it a bit since it is the back of our almost 2 acres.  We needed to see how many fans we had of a particular variety.  One of us suddenly remembered, we had 'no gator!'  meaning that we remembered that the John Deere Gator was in the shop for annual maintenance.  That meant we had to WALK out to the back of our property.  Only those over 65 or with bad back or knees can sympathize.  We felt almost as though we needed to go to the grocery store but had no car to get there.    This lead to a discussion of the tools we could no longer do without in the garden: John Deere Gator -  At our age we only begrudgingly trudge out to the beds when we can't ride out.  Lest you criticize our laziness, the gator hauls a spade, roundup, labeling supplies, tubs, recently dug plants and multiple trays of seedlings.  It also ha

Cherry Hill Garden is actually more of a daylily farm than a daylily garden. It is the home of Nancy, Bob, and Elissa Watson who have been seriously growing daylilies since 2005 here in west-central Indiana.  We had a few daylilies prior to that, but they were just one of the perennials among many.  Now, they definitely dominate the landscape of our almost 2 acres. We grow approximately 1000 named varieties and maybe 5,000+ seedlings at any one time and about 600 plants under observation for possible introduction.    Nancy, Bob, and Elissa (sitting) with our wonderful dog, Riley, out among the daylilies. Our major outlet for sales is a local event called the Herb Faire, sponsored by the Wabash Valley Herb Society.  It is held in May every year and we sell bareroot daylilies that were 'lined out' the prior fall.  We do have about 15 introductions, which we sell, but we don't offer many intros by other growers since we want to spend our energies and garden space on creating