Looking Back at 2022 and Forward to 2023
First and foremost I want to take a moment to thank everyone who obtained plants from me in 2022. You all made it my biggest year yet, allowing me to send more of my cultivars out across the US than in any year previous. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your interest in my introductions, and I am especially grateful to those of you who have obtained plants from me in multiple years. It is those of you who keep coming back for more plants that reassure me my efforts have been worth it and are appreciated by daylily growers all over the country. I was excited to again send plants to both Florida and Texas, where most have done well. While there are always a few growers who have problems with plant that are not bred in the deep south, the majority of those who have tried my plants have had good results. I haven’t yet had a cultivar fail in all instances in southern gardens, and the rust resistance levels of my cultivars seem to hold up well, repeatedly, even in the deep south. As well, I am also excited to have been able to send plants into far northern zones with excellent success, and this is giving good evidence to my hypothesis that the wildly variable weather in Kentucky is an excellent breeding ground for daylilies that can flourish in both far southern and far northern gardens.
I am excited for 2023. The new introductions are a great bunch of plants. Click here to go to the 2023 introductions page. I keep introducing plants from my rust resistance screening program which ran from 2012 through 2016 (5 years of screening in total), and I am excited to keep getting these out to people who have concerns about rust. Even for those who don’t though, many of these rust screened and highly resistant introductions from my program have proven to be very popular with growers and hybridizers, and I am always happy to see these plants being grown and hybridized with, regardless of the interest of the grower in rust resistance. My goal was always to produce beautiful, hardy, fertile daylilies with rust resistance just being an added bonus.
Please do note that, as is the case each year, the prices on many older cultivars have dropped again this year. I am always glad to drop the prices as I can, as that allows people to access these cultivars who might not be able to when they are first introduced. For a complete list of my available daylilies and pricing, click here. I am also offering special pricing for club orders. For more information on club orders, click here.
I will begin shipping for spring of 2023 in mid-April, sending plants south first and then working further north each week. I will ship through the second week of May for spring 2023. Please remember that I am just a hobbyist and don’t grow my introductions on a commercial scale, and thus some may sell out very quickly. Each year I have plants sell out and always have some disappointed people who waited too long to order. Please try to get your orders in early, especially if the plant you are interested in is noted as ‘limited availability’. Always feel free to contact me to see if a plant you are interested in is available, even if it is marked as ‘sold out’. Sometimes I may have one or two divisions left or that I can access out of one of the gardens on the farm. I don’t keep a waiting list, so keep an eye out on the website for updates on availability or contact me frequently. I don’t mind at all and am always glad to hear from daylily folks! And I love to hear how my plants are performing for you, both in the garden and in hybridizing work.
Looking back to the flower season of 2022 reminds me of how far my breeding program has come. I saw some amazing results in the seedling beds. There is much I look forward to exploring further in the years to come, and each year I see more of my original vision for my tetraploid program unfurl a little further. I saw some very fancy faces in 2022, and those on seedlings coming from my foundational introductions such as Sun Dragon, Origin of Symmetry, Eos At Dawn, Korean Queen, Far Above The World, Spice Addiction, and The Spice Must Flow. I am really excited about where these lines can go.
2022 was the 10th or 11th year for most of those original foundational introductions and I felt I finally had enough background data on them to allow me to make crosses that I had never let myself make before, out of fear I had not seen those plants over enough seasons to be 100% certain of their traits. So for 2022 my hybridizing work focused on crossing those foundational cultivars and their seedlings with each other. I made sure I wasn’t inbreeding any of the original four species-like cultivars or species clones I used to make those foundational introductions, and crossed them with an eye for height and plant traits.
When using seedlings of later generations from those foundational introductions, I crossed them to an unrelated foundational introduction, making sure not to inbreed the original founder base cultivars. This was done so that I could begin to intertwine those lines, weaving them together into even more powerful and interesting later-generation lines. The focus here, as in the other crosses I mentioned above with their founder ancestors, was toward height, scape, branching, foliage beauty, resilience and disease resistance, hardiness and fertility, but also with an eye to more advanced flower traits, which many of those later-generation seedlings show. This allows me to bring in more of the founder genetics, while at the same time working to intensify fancy flower traits onto those incredible plant traits.
Looking back to 2022 on a personal level, it was a difficult year with a lot of work. There were issues of one kind or another from the beginning of the year forward. I ended up doing a large amount of maintenance work to my home and property, while earlier in the year a family member had a major health procedure and needed assistance. I was glad to be available for my family and to care for my property, but it made for a taxing year. Here now in early 2023, I am late getting my website updates published because the heavy physical labor of the last half of 2022 has left me injured. I have pulls in my shoulders and some (apparent) nerve damage, which has made writing these updates slow and painful, but I am committed to this work and this breeding program, and so I have pushed through. Please note that the descriptions for the new 2023 introductions are shorter than in previous years. Know this is not because I am not interested, but because I have done the best I can this year. I developed a more streamlined description page for the new introductions of 2022, and that has served me well in 2023 making it possible to get the new 2023 introduction updates done in a (mostly) timely manner.
For 2023, I have plans to get a lot of older seedlings moved into the line-out garden in preparation for future introduction. This is something I haven’t been able to do for several years, including last fall, even though I had high hopes of getting some more line-outs done. Because of all the projects (and emergencies) that I was able to handle last year, I believe I will be able to get a lot of things moved this in 2023. To expedite that process, I don’t plan to make any seeds in 2023. In addition to needing to get other, more pressing, daylily work done in 2023, my seedling beds are all completely full and running over (which is another reason I have to get a lot of things moved this year). I can’t wait to see new seedlings this year and it will be hard not to make any seeds. We’ll see if I succeed! Maybe I’ll just make a few… :-)
I hope you have a wonderful 2023 and I can’t thank all of those who helped to make 2022 a great year for me enough! I hope you find something you would like to grow or breed from in the new 2023 introductions. For a complete list of my available daylilies and pricing, click here.
