I have several crosses, many are still green and on the plant. I was wondering if you have collected many this season and your process to get them germinated. Thanks

I've made crosses pretty much every day but a lot failed when we were having our heatwave. Even after it broke I'm still getting a large number of crosses not taking. So far I haven't collected any pods. I do have a couple of pods that I can wait to mature so I can plant them! But I added a lot of new plants the last two years and some ended up as NOIDs. I did crosses just to figure out ploidy and wouldn't you know that a lot of those crosses took!

I'd love to plant a lot of seeds this year but I just don't have the space. I have a very long list of seeds I'd like to start. I'm going to have to narrow it down somehow. I don't think I have room for more than 25 seedlings but I'll have to plant twice as many seeds since I have a high rate of seedling death after the first winter outside.

I'm also going to have to keep a sharp eye on the squirrels. They love to eat the pods! I haven't decided on spraying the pods or just putting the organza bags over them.

I started back in the spring and made a lot of crosses. I started using paper tags with strings, but due to all the early heavy rain I lost a lot of tags. Then I hit a spell where almost none of the crosses took, and I just quit tagging but kept crossing. So I ended up with tons of "named variety"x unknown. Then I switched to gem clips and beads and finally ended up with quite a few with both pod and pollen parent names.
I harvested many pods, and planted some seeds and put the rest in the fridge to stratify. So now I have seedlings already, but it is amazing how sporadic they are about germinating. Many of the early seeds that were planted have sprouted, but many have not while others that were planted weeks later have sprouted.
I am still setting pods being I am getting a lot of rebloom now. I have no idea what I will do with them all.

Seedfork said:I started back in the spring and made a lot of crosses. I started using paper tags with strings, but due to all the early heavy rain I lost a lot of tags. Then I hit a spell where almost none of the crosses took, and I just quit tagging but kept crossing. So I ended up with tons of "named variety"x unknown. Then I switch to gym clips and beads and finally ended up with quite a few with both pod and pollen parent names.
I harvested many pods, and planted some seeds and put the rest in the fridge to stratify. So now I have seedlings already, but it is amazing how sporadic they are about germinating. Many of the early seeds that were planted have sprouted, but many have not while others that were planted weeks later have sprouted.
I am still setting pods being I am getting a lot of rebloom now. I have no idea what I will do with them all.

@Seedfork
What is a gym clip?

I have been making crosses and collecting pods for about 2 months now. And I am still making crosses currently with some of the reblooms. Earlier I had a problem with a rat or two who was looking for food at night in my yard and I guess didn't find any, so was eating some of my pods. I had to cut all those scape pods and put them in a vase of water to make sure no more were eaten or destroyed. I should probably do that again as I have a number of pods that are almost mature.

I use colored paper clips to mark the daylilies that I cross. I have a reference list of what color paper clip I used for which cross on a particular seedling or cultivar. Then when I harvest the seeds from any given pod, I can just flip through the list to figure out which one was the pollen parent. I have been doing that for years.

I have noticed that not all of my current crosses have taken. But many do, so I don't know if the weather affected those that didn't or if the bloom or pollen was sterile or if I crossed with the wrong ploidy. But so far, going into August, I am still crossing plants and seeing seed pods forming. I guess I have yet to see if seeds are produced from these current pods when they ripen.

Sorry, that should have been Gem Clips(paper clips: the colored ones).

Just collected my first seeds ever!
I grow mostly NOIDs because I'm broke and have to rely on rescuing orphaned seedlings and cast offs to feed my daylily habit. This year I'm just trying to set seed and see if I can get them to germinate, so perfect timing on the question Teresa!
My big question about seed is now that I have them what do I do with them!?

Hi, Will
Congratulations on your first crop of dl seeds! It is a fun and addicting hobby. Like Christmas when they start blooming.

My questions is do you have to put them in the fridge if you plant them this Fall?
I have always waited until Spring.

Good info everyone, I was hoping to get a dialog going on seeds.

I've only set 5 pods, have so many seedlings from last year's LA splurge, that I know better now. This fall hopefully will put up a seedling bed, then I can go wild! Only used Helicopter pollen, which took 100% on all, and will make it easier for me to keep track of. Using the Organza bags, so far the pods look good. Will try the condiment cup with vermiculite to dry and store the seeds. Used these for cold/wet stratification on the last group of seeds last winter, and it got good germination rate. Would eliminate a step and save space. After cold strat and germination, plan to plant max of 10 in the trade gallons under lights this winter. Wore myself out with those seedling trays last year. Hope this works as well, with less effort. I'm not getting any younger, and need to find the easiest way to move forward..

Will - This is how I grow my seeds: https://garden.org/ideas/view/...

I hear you about being financially challenged when it comes to purchasing daylilies. Seeds are a very good way to add to your garden a variety of blooms.

I think it is a wonderful way to add unique plants. I haven't registered any yet but it is always fun to have extra plants to share with friends and family.

I've tried somewhere over three hundred crosses this year. Not all of them caught and some pods aborted, and I still have flowers to cross (but I probably won't). I can't guess how many pods I will harvest, other than way more than I have room to start in the house. (Still gonna try though!)

Pretty much everyone seems to dry seeds for a couple of days. Then dry chilling for a month or so (longer if one wants to wait until closer to spring before germinating), then damp chilling (stratifying) til seeds sprout.

This year I am sticking mine in little baggies (2 x 3, available at Michael's) and dampening the pod x pollen tag with water. Last year, I wrote the cross on the outside and just put in a couple of drops of water. Had issues with only one cross- not one seed in the batch germinated.

UncleWill said:Just collected my first seeds ever!
I grow mostly NOIDs because I'm broke and have to rely on rescuing orphaned seedlings and cast offs to feed my daylily habit. This year I'm just trying to set seed and see if I can get them to germinate, so perfect timing on the question Teresa!
My big question about seed is now that I have them what do I do with them!?

Easiest way for me is to directly sow them into the soil as soon as they are harvested. You can transplant the seedlings the following spring. Just make sure you mark the area of the garden where you sow the seeds.

Just to clarify a point, when you stratify (damp chill) the seeds are not supposed to be left in the fridge until they germinate. The idea is that you remove them from the fridge after a few weeks and start them at room temperature. That way they all germinate more or less together and within a short space of time.

Over the next few weeks, I will collect seed pods, label and refrigerate them in plastic bags with a piece of paper towel to absorb moisture. Then I have to clean out old seedlings and top dress seedling bed ( don't have a lot of space). . Will plant seeds directly in ground on NOV.

I have been absent from this site for quite awhile. We spent four months working on a rental, my gardens and yard have been very neglected this year

I have been hybridizing for many years and normally make at least 500 crosses. This year I've only been making a handful. Using Harold Steen, Guadamus, Bass Gibson, All Things To All Men, Lady Stephanie Victoria Redding and a few others. We're having a heat wave again, so it doesn't really pay to make the crosses because once it gets to 90 or above they don't take.

I'm in Wisconsin, pods won't be ready till most likely late September. You need to plan on a minimum of 6 weeks for the seeds to mature from the time you make the cross.

Welcome back, Sandie
Hybridizing is such a fun hobby and like Forest Gump said" you never know what you will get"

Thanks for the good information, I do have one question. If you hold some of the later seed to be planted in the Spring do you leave them in the fridge until time to plant them?

Julie, what do you top dress you seedling plot with? I have been starting mine in gallon pots.

bluegrassmom said:

Thanks for the good information, I do have one question. If you hold some of the later seed to be planted in the Spring do you leave them in the fridge until time to plant them?

yes

Seedfork said:I started back in the spring and made a lot of crosses. I started using paper tags with strings, but due to all the early heavy rain I lost a lot of tags...

...Then I switched to gem clips and beads and finally ended up with quite a few with both pod and pollen parent names.

I had a little trouble with tags this year too. I have some containers staged along a concrete block retaining wall, and for some reason it's a haven for slugs & snails. I hand-picked them relentlessly in the late evenings, but in spite of that, many of my early-season tags had the writing scraped off or were completely eaten, until I finally got around to putting some snail bait out there.

I discovered that if a Sharpie marking pen is even in the early stages of running dry, you can still write with it, but the ink 'sits on top' of the paper instead of soaking in. (This is also more likely if the tags have been previously used, because they can get a glazed surface from blossom juices) Sitting on the surface of the paper, Sharpie ink degrades in the sun, so this week I've had to decipher a few *very* faded tags. So far, there's been just enough of an imprint or 'shadow' on them that if I angle them toward the light just right, I can make out enough letters to solve the puzzle.

I remember when hybridizers started using color-coded wires to mark crosses. I think the idea came from Matthew Kaskel. He was extremely focused, and had a small stable of pollen parents he'd use all over his beds each season. I never tried it, because my hybridizing is not that disciplined, and the idea of keeping a wire-code log book to decipher it all at seed harvest sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.

I do use wires, but there's no color-coding involved. I have a clump of 'Notify Ground Crew' near the sidewalk, and each year I use one or possibly two pollens on it. This year it was Judy Davisson's 'Conspiracy Theory', last year it was Holmes' 'Elfin Sunshine'. No fluttering paper tags means less attention from mischievous passers-by. That's about the only time where it's practical for me to use wires or twist-ties instead of paper tags.

Paper tags can mold too, but it's not that much of a problem here with hand-watering and no summer rain. When they do, I soak them in a solution of 1/8 cup of water, a few drops of dish soap and a tablespoon or two of bleach. After about 10 minutes they're readable.

I've considered making my own "indestructible" tags using Tyvek and fine copper wire or paper clips, but never ran any tests to see if slugs and snails would eat it, or how well Sharpie ink would penetrate it.

So far I am liking the gem clips and beads. No abbreviations needed, just a list of the pollen parents and the marker (clip or clip and bead) associated with it. I used just clips to start with, but being the small pack of 500 clips only had a few colors I had to add the beads later.
For example: (not sure off hand these are the actually choices I made)
Erin Lea: Orange clip with orange bead
America's Most Wanted: Yellow clip with yellow bead
Planet Claire: Green clip with green bead
and of course I could use a green clip with a blue bead etc.
I don't even make a list of the crosses. I plan on using the same markers for the same pollen parents all year. So just dab the pollen add a marker and I am done. I have not lost any of them so far. I'll count blooms and if I have twenty blooms I plan on pollinating I'll make up twenty five markers (there always seems to be a few more I want to add when I get back down to the garden).
When I harvest the pod, I collect the marker and reference the maker to the pollen parent list.
I was probably doing the tagging wrong because it seemed like a major chore to me, the clips and beads seem much easier.
The beads are very bright, and when the blooms fall off the clips normally still stay in place, but I have had a few of the clips drop off because the bloom left no stub at all behind when it dropped, but it was easily seen on the ground and retrieved.
Here are some of my seed cups(photo). Most of these are registered x unknown, and these were all non stratified. I just started a second bed of seed cups with stratified seeds, and they will probably be mostly registered x unknown also. My third seed cup bed will contain all registered x registered plants and they will all have been stratified.