In the Beginning

Several years ago we moved into a new home on 18 acres of land in the country in north central Florida. We are high and dry at 80 feet above sea level. Heavy storms leave little water standing. A wooded area all around us, peaceful and quiet with Oak trees and some pines. The trees and vegetation have been here untouched for thousands maybe millions of years. So, you would think that the soil must be fertile and our daylilies that we brought with us from the other house would do well here. Wrong. We discovered that when we raked away the surface leaves what we found was nothing but pure sand. The soil was so sandy that any decayed plant matter did not remain on the surface but disappeared to the depths below. This turned out to be a big disappointment. Any rich soil and plant nutrients or fertilizer we applied to our daylilies only disappeared. Our beautiful daylilies were suffering and trying to tell us something. We did everything we could for them the first year. It was a bad year. We lost some. We tried but could not bring them back. We had never experienced this soil condition before. We were determined to do this. We badly wanted to have our daylily garden again with bright smiling colorful faces each morning during the spring and early summer. We were so relieved when our experiment worked. We planted all of our daylilies in 5 Gallon plastic nursery pots with the soil they needed, a mix of our own. Now everyone is happy and doing well.