a new strategy for daylily blooms

My first bloom of the season,
good enough to eat

In my evolving relationship with gardening, there is one very definite change I have made this year --
how I handle daylily blooms the day after.

In the past, I left them on the plant. Yeah, theyu looked scraggly, but some of them would develop seed pods, which needed nutrition. Now, there are three ways of getting new daylily plants in my garden:

• I can buy them. This has the advantage of letting me know what I'm getting, but it costs money.
• I can let the existing daylilys spread. Well, that's not really an option so much as a requirement if you have daylilys. That's free, but what you get are genetically the same as what you already have.
• I can let the seeds from existing plants grow new plants. That has the advantage of creating variety. If one cultivar pollinated a different cultivar, you can get some new variety.

I've been following the theory that all three methods are helpful. Of, course, the third has a few pitfalls, some of which I hadn't considered. Not all seedpods are viable. If the pairing is between a diploid cultivar and a tetraploid, then no plants will results. And even if plants will result, it takes several years before you get blooms -- even if you go to incredible lengths to nurture the seeds. And that's on top of the fact that not all of the blooms have even been pollinated in the first place.

These will be in a salad tonight

But even with those downside, I didn't see any harm in letting the old blooms slowly shrivel, and then letting the seedpods develop. Until a LIDS meeting earlier this year. It was explained to me that I am more likely to get reblooms if I deadhead the blooms early on.

So my new strategy? In the evening I snip off all of the day's blooms. My first bloom this season was two days ago. I ate it in a salad. Yesterday brought three more blooms. Salad. Today there are two more. They'll be in a salad this evening.