I have been down and dirty again for the last 2 days. The orange Day Lily that started out as single little sprigs took over my flower bed. I did some other things as well. I weeded and weeded and weeded and pulled ivy vines and sculpted my landscaping all with the help of my weeding wonder tool and a shovel. In this post, I am going to show you dividing day lily.
This picture first appeared in Landscape Blood Sweat Tears and Itching. I remember thinking how sparse it looked and that ” I just can’t wait for all this to fill in”. But I never expected this!
I love Day Lily. but my plan was to have a mixture of colors and flowers in this area. The Lily had different plans. They loved their new home and completely took over! Honestly, I have NEVER had anything take over quite like this except maybe some mint I planted years ago.
I think it was the fact that we had trees cut down and the stumps ground in the area. Then we had fill dirt added and graded. The fill dirt combined with the ground up stump material made a perfect environment for them to spread like crazy! Needless to say some digging up and dividing of day lily was in order. Believe it or not there are purple cone flowers planted in there, somewhere!
The very best time to dig, divide, thin and transplant is in the spring or fall after a good soaking rain. The spring is especially good for thinning as the new Day Lily sprouts are shooting up. Before the end of the summer one Day Lily becomes three. By the Spring of the next year, well, you can see what happened!
With a shovel, get up under the Day Lily as deep as you can to get as much of the root as possible. When you first step on the shovel it may feel hard almost like a rock. You may be hitting roots or the root ball. Move the shovel further away and step on it again. After several times of stepping hard on the shovel you should be able to penetrate the ground. Do this in a circle all around the plant, going underneath as well.
Once the Day Lily is out of the ground, you can cut through the roots and divide with a sharp knife. I started out filling up buckets and boxes, putting them in the car and giving them away. Then the more I thinned the pile grew and grew. Soon I had enough to fill up the bed of my pick up so I tossed quite a few on the curb. If I owned some land, I could have started a bumper crop.
I have enough Day Lily to plant a least a mile of interstate median, a blister and I feel like I have ridden a horse across country. Oh and my nails look atrocious. They may never be the same.
But I loved it. Things are shaping up nicely and I have found my purple cone flower underneath it all. Life is good…
Stay tuned for a post on how to thin day lily without digging them up and how I sculpted my bank with the weeding wonder tool!
Are these ditch lilies? If so i planted some one time and it took me forever to get them out of my beds. I was telling a fellow gardener about them and she said oh you planted b-tch lilies. What? once you plant them they are a b-tch to get rid of. That has stuck in my head every since. I have come along way since i started out as a young gardener. The bug hit me as a young girl, My aunts always had very pretty flower beds. Well i need to get back to my yard been working for 2 days planting and mulching.
I don’t know! They were randomly planted in the yard when we bought the house. So when we had the yard graded I dug them up and moved them to the flower bed. I have NEVER seen anything like it! Seriously! I think in harder ground they would not multiply like this but they have gone wild!
They will multiply in any soil. Very hardy and i would never have them again unless i could put them where they could go wild.I think that is why you see them around older homes in the ditch good place for them. Just saying. One women,s weed is another women,s flower. Lol good luck.
Yep. I will get rid of them over time. Dug up some more today. Not only are they multiplying they are huge!
I believe they are called tiger lilies but are the same ones that you see growing in the ditches every where. I remember when I was about 11, we owned a house that had these and I thought they were so great. So I dug up a clump and replanted them at our house. One little clump has taken over my mom’s entire front yard all these years. I was happy to see them come up when we bought our house, but did thin them out last year. Then turned around and bought three others in different colors, to break up all the orange lol.
Yep, they served the purpose of keeping my bank from eroding. Now it’s time to purge! They would really be beautiful on a farm or somewhere they could just go wild!
Very much enjoyed your post about the wild day lilies. In 1980 we moved into a new home in PA. which had no landscaping, except for grass. There was a slope that was 75 ft by 16 ft in the backyard which was too steep to mow. With no money to spend on landscaping the slope I decide we should go dig up daylilies from along side the road. I remember counting how many I planted on the slope, but forget not. But your description of how many you had when you divided your made me laugh, I could just picture it. It took about 10 years to competely fill in enough to keep out the weeds. It looked spectacular when in bloom, my kids loved to count the blooms and record the number on the calendar. There were about 375 to 400 blooms at the peak of summer. It was also their job to take all the stems of at the end of summer, they referred to it as the jungle. We have since moved and was very happy to see a small group of wild daylilies in the backyard. So your post brought back fond memories. Enjoyed it very much.
Awe, thanks so much Charlotte. Yes, they would be wonderful for a slope. I worked on them day before yesterday and finally am getting them under control! LOL!