Viewing post #920343 by admmad

beckygardener said:I asked about the small seedlings producing pods because I did set pods on most of my seedlings and harvested seeds from them. Some pods had a lot of seeds and some had only a couple. I did not pay attention to the number of seeds vs. the size of the seedling plant.

I had read that it is best to cut off scapes when dividing and transplanting daylilies. I didn't know if that were true or not? Having such small seedlings this Spring, I have since lost a few of them and I am wondering if it was because of the seed pods. Even other seedlings that are still alive after I harvested seeds from them are still not producing any additional fans. They remain at a single fan. So it seemed like the seed production had an adverse affect on the pod parent plants. Possibly to the point that it exhausted the plant to death? I dug around in the dirt where they were planted and found remains of decomposing roots. So the plant actually did die. While others around them are doing fine. Maybe still at a single fan, but not dead. The plants that disappeared were randomly throughout the raised bed. Not all together, but one here and one there, etc. so I don't know or even think that it was something in the soil. Maybe the genetics of the plant were just weak?

A healthy growing daylily produces excess resources that it uses for survival/growth/reproduction/etc. Whatever resources it uses for producing new fans are not available for seed production or flower production, etc. And whatever resources the plant uses for seed production are not available for producing new fans. It is always a trade-off unless the fan is large enough to produce enough surplus resources for both new fan growth and seed production. In that respect yes seed production will have an adverse effect on new fan production - a small fan may not be able to do both at the same time as it may not have enough surplus resources.