Author: cwhitesr

At times when I am busy taking pictures of the flowers, mother nature is on display. It’s a free show and you don’t need a ticket. Have your camera ready and pick a front seat.

No disappointment here. Visual Intrigue 20 April 2017.

Wow! Isle of Man is the first bloomer. 19 April 2017 Up before sunrise.

You will want to take pictures. I take lots of pictures. My camera is a Canon with a 135mm lens. This is what I use to take the pictures you see on this site. If you want to take good pictures there are things you need to know. I use manual mode where I will have more control. I use an f stop like f16 or f22 to get more depth of field for a sharper picture. With a small f stop the shutter speed will have to be slower. Now a tripod may be needed to hold the camera steady. I use an ISO setting of 800 to reduce the noise in this digital camera or in a film camera the grain. Don’t forget to watch the background for things or objects you don’t want to appear in the picture. This is the easy part. Next you will want to edit your pictures in Photoshop or other software where you can zoom in or crop, correct the color and make other adjustments to enhance the beauty of the pictures. I have taken good pictures with my smart phone and my Ipad camera but I don’t have the control like I have with my Canon.

Now we are getting to the good part. Just watch, in late March or early April for buds to start forming at the base of each fan. This is the beginning of the event to come. Some day in late April or May you will walk out to your garden in the freshness of the early morning and will be greeted with many colorful little smiling faces. This is what you have been waiting for. This is your reward. This will continue each day till some time in July when they all will rest and prepare for the next spring. When they are all blooming, get closer, smell their fragrance, but don’t get pollen on your nose. Look at the awesome detail of their structure and you will be amazed and come to love them. They will remember you and greet you again in the Spring to come.

If you enjoy your daylilies you will want more and more of them. If you want to remember their names you will need to label them. We found that a magic marker will fade out over time from the sunlight and you won’t see it again. We use white plastic labels from a seed and plant provider like Parks or Burpee. Then we use a tape label writer and apply the name directly to the plain white plastic labels. You would think that this would be enough but it is not. The squirrels and the grand kids run off with these labels and now you don’t know in which pot they belong, if you find them. Now we also write on the these black pots with a white paint marker.

In the late Summer, Fall and Winter all you can do is keep your daylilies watered and weed free. At this time they require less water, since they are not blooming and they do well in the mild Florida Winters. However if you have baby plants coming up in the pots now is the time to separate those babies and put them into their own separate pots. See how easy it is to increase the size of your garden and if you loose one you still have one. This picture was taken in November.

The blooming period for the (Hemocallis) daylilies is in the Spring starting in late April and ending in the heat of July. This is in North Central Florida where we live but may be different in other areas. This picture was taken in June.

If we get no rain we have to water our daylilies during the hot summer every 2 or 3 days, but thankfully less during the colder winter season.  At first we watered using a garden hose and later with a sprinkler system. In the winter they are not growing, blooming or budding and require less water. If a freeze is coming we water which helps to protect the roots.

This isn’t the Garden of Eden any more. When you have a lovely garden of beautiful plants it’s like putting up a large sign which says to all bugs for miles around, “come here and feast”, and they do. Not all bugs are bad. Some good bugs come to feed on the bad bugs.  The bad ones will suck and chew the life out of your plants. We started adding a systemic chemical into each potted plant every 6 weeks to eliminate the chewing insects. The systemic doesn’t bother any other garden visitors like the butterflies, chameleons and Bumble bees as you will see in our pictures. Nature is a beautiful thing to watch if it doesn’t come to eat your garden but comes to eat in your garden. A little organic fertilizer added helps to maintain proper balance.