Seeding dreams

Hybridizing is as bit like seeding clouds to encourage rainfall, except instead of clouds, you're seeding your dreams.  Instead of silver iodide, dry ice or table salt, you're dumping seeds into your dreams in the hopes of producing  remarkable bud counts of gorgeous colors floating over undulating waves of green.

A seed with the radical just beginning to grow

After harvest, I dry the collected seeds for 48 hours, drop them into a masking tape labeled 2"x 2" Ziploc, and refrigerate them.  Easy if you've harvested the entirety of the cross on one day, time consuming if it's a long cross whose pods ripen over an extended period of time.  That requires storing some crosses in a "Not Done" bin.  Since I sell some 35,000 seeds a year plus produce 5,000-10,000 for me, the process of pollinating, recording crosses, labeling them on the plant, harvesting seeds, labeling and drying seeds occupies from late June through late October and sometimes even into November. 

And yes, I admit to having plant sex dreams.  I have pollinated in my sleep; sometimes, I even have respect for the crosses the next morning.   

About half of my seeds are taken out on New Year's Day.  Their masking tape labels are transferred to jar lids, the seeds are dumped in and the jars are filled with a solution of 1 tablespoon bleach to one gallon of water.  I search out jars with plastic lids.  While rusting metal doesn't seem to bother seed germination, checking seeds through rusty water bothers me.  My favorite plastic-topped jar, a tall, very skinny thing, also holds one of my favorite foods: Goya Pickled Tabasco Peppers.  In the 16 years since I first started growing daylilies from seed, I have consumed over 120 jars of pickled Tabascos and would have eaten 3 times as many had I not started growing my own hot peppers the instant I moved from shady Niagara Falls to full sun Burt.  Here's where my method differs from most and why I am writing this entry: once filled and closed, I put the jars in the fridge.

The seeds swim and eventually sink in the fridge until I take some out on Groundhog Day.  (Do I not know how to celebrate the holidays or what?).  Some stay soaking in the fridge for up to six weeks.  I've been using this method for 8 years and can attest to the fact that the seeds do not drown and the germination rate is greater than room temperature soaking.  Cold moist stratification is recommended by AHS (check out "Stratification" in the Daylily Dictionary on the AHS site); this is uber cold moist stratification.  The seeds are easy to check, unlike the moist paper towel in a waterproof plastic bag method.  There's no need to pick the seeds out of any moist medium and no need to rinse them off to see them well enough to plant them.  Just dump the jar contents into a strainer, dump the strainer contents into a bowl and away you go.  As long as your fridge maintains at about 40º your food, and your soaking seeds, are safe.  The black phytomelan within the seed coat, made up of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, may bleach out from some of the seeds, but the seed coat is still intact and germination is not affected.

Unlike the germination of Lycopersicon cheesmanii, a wild tomato that requires transit through the digestive tract of the Galapagos tortoise or a half hour soak in a brutal 50% household bleach bath, the bleach in the daylily soak isn't there to encourage germination.  It (some folks use hydrogen peroxide instead) is only there to help control the growth of bacterial and fungal pathogens.

A bunch of crosses had to be removed after only 3 weeks this year because they'd started to germinate so, unplanned, I celebrated National Squirrel Appreciation Day by planting seeds on January 21.

Any seeds that don't germinate in the fridge after 6 weeks are immediately planted and usually sprout within 7-10 days.  Pre-germinated seeds sprout in 6-7 days.  Some seeds will linger and not show their pointy little green noses for a month or more.  And there's always some that were just as hard and plump as their siblings when removed from the soak that were really duds in disguise.  One very frustrating example: I've never gotten more than 40% germination from String Bikini seeds with soaking at room temperature, cold moist stratification or cold wet stratification.

I pot my seeds in half gallon and quart cartons that once held milk or orange juice (with calcium, of course) or half and half.  I am mighty peeved that real milk no longer comes in paper cartons, and just as peeved that Tropicana has switched to plastic jugs.  Orange juice consumption has declined 40% in the last 15 years.  The industry blames increased cost and a change in the breakfast habits of Americans.  If Tropicana wants me to drink their oj, they'd have to switch back to paper cartons.  The benefits of milk cartons over plastic pots is that they tend to be deeper, can be crammed more closely together because they have straight sides, and best of all, there's no knocking the plants out of the pots, you just slit the sides of the carton.  I have successfully raised 104 diploid seedlings within the 4" x 4" surface area of a half gallon carton.  Because I ship plants from mid April through May, I don't start planting the seedlings into the garden until June at the earliest.  All 104 of those seedlings survived; not a one of them produced a keeper.

I cut out as much of the bottoms of the cartons as possible, cover the resulting 2 large holes with a double layer of paper towel, drop in a few packing peanuts and fill the pots with moistened Promix with lots of perlite added.

A carton holding 3 crosses

 

I use cut up milk jugs to both label and divide pots to hold multiple crosses.  Hybridizing is my best method of warding off osteoporosis.  I plant the seeds, cover them with no more than ¼" of the mix, then rubber band a clear plastic bag over the top and set them on a tray in a warm room until the sprouts are showing.  The pots then are placed under 4' long shop lights holding regular 40 watt fluorescent bulbs.  I let the surface of the pot get bone dry but check the bottoms and water if they are dry.  As soon as most of the seedlings are 5" or taller, they all get a haircut which allows the shorter plants in shared pots equal access to light.  I then set up an oscillating fan and instantly have a waving sea of green.  And no fungus gnats.  Oh, I'll eventually see a few because every potting mix has fungus gnat eggs, but they don't fly well enough in the wind created by the fan to meet up and create a new brood, and they really do hate dry soil.  Freezing does not kill them.  These critters also live outside.  If they and their eggs froze to death, we sure wouldn't have fungus gnats in western NY.  Granted, the fungus gnats in my wood chip pile may not be the same as those in my potting mix. Over 1700 species within the fungus gnat family of Sciaridae have been identified!  So far. 

My objective in starting daylilies indoors is to get plantable plants, not to shorten the seed-to-bloom time, so I only use a tiny amount of water soluble fertilizer.  I also don't harden them off.  I just take the 70 half gallon and 133 quart pots out in April and place them in part shade for a few weeks before putting them in full sun.  Frost doesn't seem to hurt them any worse than sudden sunshine.  Many of the leaves turn yellow and die off during this time.  I water more frequently once the plants are outdoors and new leaves sprout. 

Another benefit of adding perlite is that it makes it much easier to rip the seedlings apart come planting time.  Despite all this rough treatment, I usually see at least one quarter of the seedlings bloom the following year, and 90% or more by the second year after planting.

There was one glorious year where I was able to direct sow into prepared ground shortly after Thanksgiving.  Germination was excellent.  Since then, however, we've had rainy autumns, plus seedlings now must be planted into beds where 3 year old seedlings are growing.  The loser 3 year seedlings need to be tilled into micro particles that are brought up to the surface and dried to death, then a bit of hand digging must be undertaken to extract the survivors that will show up over the next 2 weeks.  Because we often have heavy snow cover that compresses the miserable silt soil here, tilling in spring works best for me and produces a nice crumbly plot ready to accept skinny little baby daylily plants.  So, I start my seeds indoors.  I've thought about winter sowing in pots in small covered enclosures, but that would entail braving the cold and trusting that deer, fox, mice and squirrels (who I don't really appreciate) would  leave them alone.

So, exactly what are the dream makers in that carton of 3 crosses?  I planted 5 seeds of Heavenly Tiger Tails X my current favorite tet seedling, [(Ondine x String Bikini) X Blushing Octopus #5]:

56 seeds of Unicorn Eraser X Free Wheelin':

and 17 seeds of (Lavender Light x Blue-eyed Curls seedling # 22) X

[Waiting in the Wings x (Swallow Tail Kite x Lavender Arrowhead seedling # 36)}:

I plan to introduce the wiwstklad-36 seedling in 2015 because it's a bluer purple than Applique, Wind Master or any other similarly patterned narrowish daylilies I've seen.  That's one of a million dreams fulfilled.

 

 

  

 

          

Mostly, Mom didn't know

By 1973, Dad had saved up almost 3 months of vacation time and we set off on the trip of our lifetime: from Buffalo to Alaska via Canada.

The cake the gals in the office baked for Dad

We pulled off to use the outhouses in a Yukon roadside campground.  They were about 30' apart.  I was just getting ready to leave when Dad yelled "Linda, I can't open the door!"  I peered out and saw a large brown bear standing against it with its paws on the door, looking like it was trying to tip the outhouse over.  I think I yelled back that he'd better wait until the bear left on its own.  I kept peeking out and it wasn't too long before I was able to declare it safe to come out.  Mom and my brother had been busy in the trailer, so they missed the excitement and we never told them.

Mom refused to look at the grizzly that was shaking the trailer while she and I were getting dinner ready a few days later.  It was scratching its back on the corner.  Dad and Dennis were off fishing.  We did tell them.

My only other close encounter with a bear occurred while camping with Dad on Turcott Lake in Ontario.  I was awakened by something pushing my side of the pup tent against my face.  I heard cans rattling.  I swear I heard grunting.  Dad told me not to worry, it was just raccoons.  Raccoons, my eye!  Morning light showed bear prints all around the tent, plus a torn garbage bag and empty food cans strewn about, some with sharp toothy punctures in them.  Dad had thought that since we burned the food residue completely from the cans, (not to mention that we got to this spot via an abandoned logging trail so the bears weren't likely to be attuned to garbage), leaving the bag of cans near the tent was safe.  That was the last time we did that, and we sure never told Mom.

Whenever we camped some 7 miles from the truck at Spy Lake in the Adirondacks, Dad stored all the food in metal garbage cans bungee-corded shut.  When we heard an outrageous racket one night, we grabbed our flashlights and found a raccoon, biggest we'd ever seen, rolling the can down toward the water.

Moraine Lake, Banff National Park, Alberta

The first moose I ever saw was on my 18th birthday in Banff.  The closest I came to a non-zoo one was when I made a fast turn around a corner in the narrow waterway joining Turcott Lake with Canonto Lake.  The very frightened Mr Moose left a dent in the aluminum bow before it charged off.  My hands hit the mud on the shore, but the channel was too narrow for the canoe to flip over.

Matanuska Glacier, Alaska

While in Alaska, I somehow wound up hiking the Horseshoe Lake trail in Denali Park alone.  Dad and Dennis must have been fishing, Mom was probably in the trailer cooking or doing her hair or something.  I was happy to see the bench at the top.  I admired the view and then took out my sketch book and got very engrossed in drawing caribous I'd seen rolling in the snow earlier that day.  I was startled by a spitting/hissing sort of sound punctuated with hacking.  Ugly sound.  A lynx stood maybe 15' from me.  And it was coming towards me!  I could see its slitty little pupils.  I could probably have counted the hairs in its ear tufts.  I started talking to it. I recall whispering "nice kitty" a lot.  After several hours of this, or so it seemed, I noticed a rabbit or hare sitting at my foot.  I stomped my foot, the rabbit ran off with the lynx in hot pursuit, and I ran off back down the trail.  On the way down, I told some hikers that I'd seen a lynx up there.  "Oh, that's just Willy.  He's always up there." 

I didn't tell Mom, but I did tell Dennis.  He bought a lynx tail for 50 cents a few days later and spent the rest of the trip chasing me with it.

Dad had bobcats at his 72 acre weekend farm in Alleghany county, NY.  He made us swear that we'd never tell Mom.  When Joe and I took a friend from New York City, along with her boyfriend, camping for the very first time, we stayed at Little Sand Point, a state campground on Piseco Lake.  A bobcat walked between our pup tents the first night, howling quite loudly, and Joe and I both hoped our friends were hearing it, and maybe getting scared.  Nope, they even slept through the sound of our neighbor hitching up their camper and leaving in the dark.  We later learned from Ranger Bill that our neighbor had brought her pet cat camping with her and that the cat was in heat and that had attracted the bobcat.  Hey, people: spay and neuter! 

And please don't leave tangled wads of fishing line all over the shores.  I was canoeing on the Piseco River when I spotted a Merganser acting a little strange on shore.  Pulling up next to it revealed that the poor duck was all entangled in monofilament.  I was an evil smoker back then and used a lighter to melt through the line in enough spots that I could unwrap the duck.

Somewhere during the Alaska trip, I recall canoeing up to a beaver lodge and hearing babies whining quite cutely inside.  Because of the extreme clarity of Muncho Lake in BC,  I was able to watch a beaver, and numerous squaw fish, swim under my canoe.  The only thing Dennis caught there was a freshwater eel.  But the blue green water of the 7½ mile long lake is what we remember most    I think it was in Manitoba where we came upon a lake about 2 miles long that had steel gray water and an utterly black shore.  Closer inspection revealed the lake was so overpopulated with tadpoles, small waves were beaching them.  We gave up trying to rescue them when the wind started picking up.  There was no way to stop the tadpoles from being washed onto land.

Echo Cliff overlooking Piseco Lake (upper left is Oxbow Lake)

Joe and I witnessed another apparent overpopulation when we canoed among millions of one inch round freshwater jellyfish, Craspedacusta sowerbii, in the brackish water of Oxbow Lake in the Adirondacks one September.  I've since learned that the majority of the population of these jellyfish in the US are usually all male or all female so sexual reproduction is rare.  I did tell Mom about these guys, pointing it out as a case where not having sex is pretty kinky.

I won't be seeing moose or bears or lynx now that I'm tied by the roots of daylilies to my home in western NY.  But there's lots of critters here.  My only startling close encounter, however, was with deer.  I was walking on the crest of the cliff overlooking Eighteen Mile Creek, 150' below me, when I was almost knocked down by first one, then another whitetail leaping up over the side.  Missed me by mere inches.  I did not tell Mom.

Introduction

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While this blog will mostly be about the positive aspects of daylilies, the first few entries will focus on what daylilies have stolen from me.  Specifically: camping.  Spending all spring, summer and most of fall in my field messing with daylilies doesn't allow time for traveling to the wilds of northern mountains.  While I'd love to take a week off midwinter and canoe the Everglades, it just wouldn't be the same as visiting the Adirondack locations I'd learned to love through spending 2 weeks, sometimes more, every year for 35 years. 

Reading about the magnificent views from the mountain tops or finding Moccasin  flowers along a trail wouldn't be of much interest, especially since I never had a decent camera for with which to illustrate.  Stories of encounters with wildlife, however, might be amusing.  I hope.

Dad and I, and sometimes my younger brother, frequently camped on an eutrophic pond called Mud Lake.  It was accessible by a narrow channel running off the Piseco River and bordered on 3 sides with floating spaghnum moss anchored by sheep laurel and dotted with Pogonia orchids and pitcher plants.  I suspect it was the remoteness that attracted Dad more than the fishing.  We got a little bored of sitting around the campfire one night so decided to take the flashlight out in the canoe and see what we could see.  The water was pitch black and utterly still. It felt like we were paddling through heavy oil when we suddenly heard a loud, low bellow.  It was a sound I recalled from a trip to Florida when I was 8: an alligator.  Of course, it couldn't be, not here in the Adirondacks.  The bellowing persisted.  Dad pointed the flashlight toward the sound but we were too far from the shore to make out what it was so I paddled as fast as I could and rammed the front of the canoe smack into the spaghnum.  Dad was just 2 feet from a standing black bear.  Must have been 8' tall.  Mist puffed out of its nostrils like the engine of my Lionel train.  The bear huffed, fell to all fours and ran in the other direction.  We bounced in the canoe as the whole surface of the lake shook.  Dad refused to ever go out in the canoe with me at night again.

One year, my husband and I carried into Clockmill Pond in the same area of the Adirondacks.  At full speed without a load, it's a 45 minute hike.  With Joe carrying the canoe and me doing the trail twice to carry in all of our stuff, it was 2 arduous hours.  That night, Joe nudged me awake to hear awful barking and howling.  We had read several reports of wild dogs in Buffalo and elsewhere in NY attacking children that summer.  The howling was coming closer and closer right down the mountainside and straight towards us.  At the time, wolves were thought to be extinct in the Adirondacks so all we could think was: wild dogs!  We jumped into the canoe, pushed off  and floated in the middle of the pond for hours.  The moon was full and illuminated the forest edges but we didn't see any movement.  There was only those horrible sounds.  The dogs sounded like they were fighting with each other.  Then abruptly, all went silent.  We packed up the next morning and spent the rest of the week at Little Sand Point, a public campsite on Piseco Lake.  The ranger there told us they didn't have a wild dog problem and it must have been the coyotes chasing down a deer.  

Along the Piseco River.  The hill on the left is Mud Mountain against which Mud Lake is nestled.  

I took a college roommate to Mud Lake one year.  As we approached the beaver dam (the only reason the lake still existed), she turned around and announced she was not getting out on that dam.  Found out she had snake phobia so any time we crossed the dam, I had to turn the canoe around (luckily, it's only 15' 'cause a 17 footer would not have made it) and approach it backwards, get out and scare the sunning snakes away.  After we set up the pup tent, we saw another canoe making its way to the other side of the lake.  I was disappointed.  In all the years of camping there, I'd never seen anyone else spend more than a few hours on the lake.  These new people were staying.  Rats!  So much for the wilderness experience.

We were awakened that first night by the sound of gunfire.

The next morning, the 3 old geezers from across the lake came over and said they'd been surrounded by coyotes and they had to shoot at them and they were leaving and we had better, too.  Even my roommate laughed.  We spent 3 pleasantly quiet days on the lake before packing up.

Now, this has never happened before or since, but wouldn't you know it, when we pulled up the ground tarp, there was a poor smooshed snake.  My friend turned ghostly white and fell against a tree.  She was twice my size so no way could I have dragged her into the canoe.  I grabbed a can of soda, ready to toss it on her.  Happily, she did not faint dead away.  But we never went camping together again.

There's a pond near Silver Lake in Wyoming County, NY that was once so full of water snakes you could pick them up with each paddle stroke.  I never took my friend there, either.  The Morton Salt Factory is nearby, and close to it is a pond that was so overpopulated with Painted turtles, the shoreline was encrusted with the shells of their deceased.  Curious weasels, fattened on turtle eggs no doubt, would pop in and out among the cattails.  My brother and I used to catch 200 or so baby Painteds each year and sell them for 50 cents apiece to a local pet shop.  We'd get a quarter for the baby snappers but the store would only take 10 of those.  The way it worked was: my brother would spot the turtle nose peaking from the duckweed and I'd paddle us over and he'd scoop up the turtle in his hand.  Sometimes the turtle would dart underwater and Dennis would have to move fast to catch it.  The thing of it is, you can't tell the size of a turtle just by its little nostrils among the floating vegetation.  When one darted away, my brother reached down and felt what he thought was a log.  For some reason, he decided to lift the log with his paddle.  He had turned to say something to me when I saw a humongous snapper head, mouth wide open, just inches from his hand.  Well, that explained all the 3 legged turtles we'd been catching.  We never went back to that pond again.            

One year I camped alone on Spy Lake, also accessible via the Piseco River but, unlike Mud lake, springfed and clear.  Half of the lake is private and hosts 3 summer cottages; I camped on the half owned by the International Paper Company.  It's the only place I've observed waterscorpions (also known as water stick-insects) and bald eagles fishing.  I was lying on my own private beach when I heard a commotion in the underbrush to my left.  If I hadn't moved fast, I'd have had a mink hat.

While I'm mostly writing this so that I can reread it in my doddering elderly years, I do hope some readers will be entertained so I'll take a breather here.  There will be more bear stories, plus moose and lynx encounters in my next entry.  Hopefully, my writing style will improve by then.

 Normally I wouldn't publish a photo of myself but, since this was taken over 30 years ago, it's not really me anymore.