Storing and Planting Seeds North vs South.

Saturday, 14 November 2009 10:47 |

Collecting, Storing and Planting Daylily Seeds:

A Southern Method

(John Peat, Cross Border Dayilies, Canada)

Harvesting seeds:

Picking seeds is done when the pod cracks open and you can see the little black seeds inside. In the southern states it isn’t necessary to store seeds over winter, rather it is best to get them in the ground before labor day if you want to see the majority of them bloom the following season.

Picking:

When picking seeds, we usually have many, many Dixie Cups handy in a small square basket. We then pick the seed pod, writing the pod parent on the tag at the time of picking, and plop it into a cup. We then put an empty cup inside the cup that contains the seed pod and tag. For us, this is typically done in early to mid July.

Storage:

We then shuck the seeds (discard the seed pod, keeping the seeds) indoors, as this time of year it is much more comfortable to do in the air-conditioned comfort of the living room. It is at this time that we transfer the parentage to plastic tags using a 4H pencil. Seeds and tag are then placed in a Ziplock baggy with a squirt of a mixture of ‘Ban rot’ and water from an old shampoo bottle. We then place all the bags of seeds into a larger bag and mark the bag with the date picked. These larger bags are placed into the vegetable keeper in the refrigerator for three weeks to simulate the minimum amount time needed for the seeds to break dormancy.

Planting:

We then plant our seeds into Oasis Cubes with a sterile Oasis 'medium' after soaking the trays in a mix of Subdue, Banrot (to prevent damp off) and fertilizer. Push the plastic tag in the first hole (with writing facing towards you) planting the seeds behind the tag. Use the eraser end of a pencil to gently push the seed into the hole in the medium (the depth of the length of the eraser) this prevents the seed from pushing up out of the cube when roots develop. While doing this, be sure to give your little seeds the squeeze test. If the seed is hard and doesn’t squirt or collapse when you squeeze it, chances are it should still be alive and well. The reason we use the Oasis Cubes is that many seeds don’t sprout, and space in the garden is limited. We only plant seedlings and therefore don’t have many gaps between our seedlings.

Store your trays, stacked one on top of another in the air-conditioned house at 78F for maximum germination for two weeks being careful not to pull out your tags. After two weeks, place your trays outside in full shade (shade is critical as your seedlings need to adjust to the higher outdoor temperatures). Don’t worry about the color of your seedlings when first taken them outside. They will start to green up in 24 hours.

After your seedlings have developed 5 to 6 leaves (approximately three weeks), it is time to plant the seedlings in the ground. You will have less kill-off if you use shade cloth above your seedling area. Always water thoroughly after planting for several days, preferably very early morning before sunrise.

Collecting, Storing and Planting Daylily Seeds:

The Northern Method

(Mick Morry, Avalonia Daylilies, Canada)

Harvesting seeds:

We collect our seed pods when the pods have become very brown and have started to crack open. Each cross – the pod parent and the pollen parent, which is identified by the tags we made (see explanation just below), is recorded on an additional small piece of paper (roughly 3 inches x 1.5 inches) which we have cut up by the hundreds in advance to record this information on.

The seed pods and identifying information paper are then put into l plastic 1 ounce-sized mini condiment cups. We bought our cups in bulk through a supplier who provides them to a Chinese restaurant owned by friends of ours. We bought several thousand, which come in a small box, so they are easily storable. You can also buy these mini cups online from suppliers. We bought our first cups from Earthstar who sells many supplies used by daylily hybridizers.

Our identifying tags – used to record the pollen parent – are something we came up with that allows us to recycle tags each year. We purchased a large number of thin-coloured wires called 'bell' wires, from a daylily supplier (Earthstar), that are used to identify crosses. For us, there were not enough colour options, so I came up with the idea of cutting 6 inch plant labels – you can get 5 to 6 cut up pieces out of a single label. I cut angled corners so the mini label is not sharp to the touch. Then I burned a single small hole in each using a candle flame, which heats a metal eye-glasses screwdriver, bought at a dollar store. It doesn't heat up much but makes a hole quicker than a pin.

The beauty of these labels is you can write a number that corresponds to the pollen parent(s) you are using each year. We keep a record book to record the numbers used, so that as the pods are opened, we need only refer to the book to identify what the pollen parent was. These tags are collected after the pods and seeds are harvested, erased over the winter, and re-used in subsequent seasons. These are far better than the paper tags which get destroyed and become unreadable in heavy rain, and are not recyclable in any case. And they are a heck of a lot cheaper!

Once we've collected and cupped the pods and their paperwork for the day, we place all the cups on top of a couple of sheets of newspaper on bread trays – the sort of trays used by stores to bring multiple loaves of bread into a store at one time. You can put several hundred of these cups on a single one of these trays.

We got ours from a bread company locally that was changing its trays and was just trying to get rid of the older style trays (which weren’t collapsible. The new ones they use are, which makes them more storable-friendly for the bread company, but not as useful as the rigid ones we use). The advantage of the trays is their stackability. When you have a lot of seeds, stackability really helps you dry the pods and seeds in limited space while allowing proper air circulation so you don’t get mold. We store up to 15 trays of pods/seeds in a spare bedroom in our house as they dry, stacking up to 8 trays high.

If you cannot find the trays hopefully you have access to a store that will let you take away large cardboard boxes. Cut these down so that they are approximately 5 inches deep and re-cycle the rest of the box at your curb side. These storage methods allow us to open the pods at our leisure in the comfort of the house, and not just one by one as we collect them.

Opening the seed pods:

We open the seed pods while referencing our pollen parent code book, or by referring to photos we've made of the code book pages which we had previously saved to our hard drives. This allows us to open the pods in comfort while sitting at our computers.

We hybridize, usually from late May (if we've brought in plants from Florida in March/April and kept them in a small greenhouse that will later be planted in May), until the second week of August. This means our pod-picking time runs from mid-July to mid-October. As pods are opened, all seeds get the squish test and must also be glossy black and firm. If they have a white blemish or are flat brown or black they are tossed--no exceptions. Keeping bad seeds will create mold you otherwise wouldn't have in seed storage, and mold spreads fast--even through a zip-lock baggie.

Both parents are listed on the 3 x 1.5 inch piece of paper and the seeds are place with not more than 20 smaller seeds, or 12 larger seeds, in each of the cups. We find more seeds than this can lead to rot as they dry, so if you have multiple pods of the same cross, limit the number of seeds in any one cup and write a new parentage paper for the additional cups needed.

Drying the seeds:

Once the seeds have been harvested, we bring the trays to the spare bedroom where they are allowed to dry completely before we package them.

All the seeds that have passed the squish test are dried from 5-12 days. The average for us is around 7 days of drying. We live in a valley that is very humid during this time of year, but the seeds tend to dry quickly. If a pod is super brown and the seeds are solidly dry we skip the squish test.

The seeds and their cross information are then slipped into glassine envelopes for storage. Glassine is a very thin and smooth type of paper which is air and water resistant. It is the paper that is used by most seed storage companies and vendors for just that reason. If you Google 'glassine', you can find these envelopes for sale in small or large quantities from a variety of vendors across the USA and Canada. I have even seen them listed on Ebay. I have never lost a seed to mold since I started using the glassine envelopes. They are re-usable for many years too if you carefully fold over the top, take that label of the parents and staple it to outside of the envelope at the top, with one staple. I have put as many as 40 seeds into a single envelope with no deterioration of seeds using this method. Try that with a Ziploc bag which sweats and absorbs moisture from the surrounding air, no matter how dry you think the seeds inside are, or the air outside is!

Once the seeds are all stored, we put the bread trays outdoors for the winter, as they won’t be needed again till spring.

Storage of seeds:

We store all our seeds in their glassine envelopes, inside plastic grocery store bags. Around 8 bags will hold 20,000 seeds. We store these bags in the coldest part of the house for most of the winter. For us, this is in our basement laundry room in a cabinet. It is quite cold and dry and dark in that room, and it suits our needs perfectly. I never need to use a refrigerator, but if you don't have a very cold spot in your house, put them in the fridge for at least 40-50 days. They do not need a longer period than this. Germination will occur just fine.

Planting the seeds:

Here again we have tried to invent the better mousetrap. We've tried all sorts of ways to get seeds to grow faster, for plants to mature more quickly and to beat the typical 2-3 years it takes for a northern daylily plant to go from seed to blooming plant. We have given up all winter indoor plantings. We have tried a variety of germination and growing methods to jumpstart the growing season and grow strong vigorous plants and the truth is, it hasn't worked for us. It resulted in weak seedlings, and weak seedlings become stringy weak plants once placed outdoors.

Now, we enjoy the winter hiatus and then, come late March or early April of each year, we take our bags out of storage and begin potting up the seeds in to a soilless seedling germination mix made up of peat/perlite etc. that we purchase by the bale called ProMix BX. It is an ideal germinating medium. All our seeds are planted – by cross, with up to 20 seeds together – into community pots--filled with this seedling mix. A plastic label is written which lists pod and pollen parent which will follow the seedlings into the garden when they are planted out.

We use 5/6 inch square plastic pots for these plantings because we can perfectly fit 36 pots in those very same bread trays brought in from outdoors, once again. No newspaper is on the bottom now as they will be grown and watered in those trays. We cover the seeds with around 2 inches of soil loaded with peat and perlite (which will raise the seeds a bit during the first few waterings.)

Pots are stored on top of each other once again, 8 trays high and left stored and unwatered until we are ready to germinate them.

In late April we move the trays outdoors into unheated, but covered shelters. We use several Lee Valley hoop houses. We have also used hoola hoops cut in half and inserted into the ground in rows that we drape with 6-10 mm plastic as a seed germination cover.

We also have a small unheated greenhouse that is used later in the season for growing spicy hot peppers. 18 trays go into an unheated small greenhouse where we place them on the remnants of 3 stripped down 3 tier plant units, each of which can hold 6 of those bread trays containing 36 pots.

On the 1st of May (not before) we begin watering all the pots. We water every day early in the morning and on really hot days again towards the evening. As the seeds germinate (it takes 10 days to 2 weeks to see substantial germination, and sometimes longer depending on how dormant some seed crosses are) we top-dress the pots with any of the good time-release fertilizers such as Osmocote, Nutricote, or Miracle Grow.

Within six weeks the seedlings are germinated and growing vigorously. At this point, they are taken out of their germination areas and are planted out directly into the ground, or in our case into our raised box beds. We make 10' x 5' raised boxed beds and plant between 600 and 1,200 seedlings per bed around 3 inches apart. The plastic tag we wrote identifying the potted cross is placed deeply into the soil where the first seedling of that cross begins, and you can identify each cross because it runs till you reach the next tag. Once a box is planted, we record every cross in the box, making a "roadmap", row by row that tells us what a cross is, just in case the tag is ever broken or lost. That way we always know what is in the bed in case of missing or broken labels.

All that is left to do, is to wait for these babies to grow and bloom.

For those interested in seeing some of this process in a series of 18 photos, visit our website at: Avalonia Daylilies

Note: In both methods above, the Zip-lock Baggy is not necessary. A regular sandwich baggy may be used and rolled tight so that excess air is removed.

_{Updated: November 19, 2009}