Now this blog article isn’t supposed to give you all the ins and outs of hybridizing, but it will give you a start on what really is a fun aspect of gardening.
You have seen all those $100.00+ new introductions from the hybridizers and you would like to try a few of your own, well here is how to get started. You have some blooms starting on your daylilies and you want to try hybridizing some new daylilies. I’ll give you the short course or hybridizing 101. The first thing you need is 2 daylilies in bloom. Take the stamen (the little pollen generator) which is one of the small filaments in the center of the flower. The pollen should be yellow and fluffy. Take a walk through your garden and look at your daylily blooms early in the morning just after they have opened up. The stamens haven’t fully opened and let the pollen out. Later in the morning – say 9 or 10 am; the pollen should be dry and fluffy. You will get to know the difference after you have tried it a couple of times.
Take the stamen from one daylily to another one in bloom and rub the yellow pollen onto the end of the pistal. Congratulations, you have just crossed one plant with another one! Now if you want to remember what two plants you crossed write a little tag and tie it around the bottom of the bloom. A lot of hybridizers use small paper price tags that have string already attached to them for this. Wait about a week or so and see if the pollen generated a seed pod. If it did (not all do), leave it alone until it grows and turns brown (do not cut the scape off later to use in a floral arrangement). When it is about to split open – you should get a number of black seeds inside the seed pod, pluck the seed pod off and put it into a plastic ziplock with the tag, and place it in the refrigerator for 3 weeks.
After three weeks, take the seeds out and plant them into a fine germinating mix, keep moist (but not soaked) until they germinate. After they have germinated and grown to about 3 – 6″, move them to a bigger pot or line them out in a well prepared garden bed where you will see them and check on them frequently. You probably won’t get a flower the first year, but you should by the second year. If you like the flower and the plant and you want to register it through the AHS (our national daylily society) wait until the plant is at least three years old and go to www.daylilies.org for further information on registering your daylilies. Now, you should have harvested more than one seed from a cross that took. If all of these seeds germinated, grew and bloomed, the flowers would all look slightly different.
There is also one major rule that you should know about, and that is only diploids can cross with diploids, and only tetraploids will cross with tetraploids. How to find out what kind of daylilies you have is simple if you know their names. Again go to www.daylilies.org and go into the database program and look up the information on your daylily or check the catelog where you purchased your daylily. If you don’t know, what a lot of hybrizers do, is go ahead and cross whatever two plants you want and see what happens.
Just remember, this isn’t rocket science, and if the bees can do it, so can you! Also if you want some help, go ahead and let the bees do your work for you. When you find a seed pod, go ahead and wait it until it is about to split, then plant as above. The cross would be listed as unknown x the daylily you took the seed pod from. So with this information, go forth and create even more wonderful plants!