Your Daylilies Are Here!

Some tips on how to take care of your daylilies now–and later!

What to do now:

  • Open the box to give your daylilies some air.
  • Plant as soon as you can: Your daylilies can wait a few days, or longer if necessary, to be planted, but the sooner the better! Until you can plant your daylilies, open up the box and keep it somewhere cool and shaded. (Don’t leave them sitting in the sun!)

How to Plant:

  1. Don’t divide your daylilies! The big plants we send are healthier and more likely to
    bloom their first season if you plant them like they are, rather than splitting them into smaller plants.
  2. Plant somewhere sunny! (or at least partly sunny)
  3. Any decent garden soil should be fine. If your soil is particularly sandy or
    heavy, you may want to amend with compost or a soil amendment.
  4. Dig a hole: larger than the root mass and deep enough so the crown of the plant (where the roots meet the leaves) is about an inch below the surface. You see that band of white at the base of the foliage? That’s the depth it was planted when it was growing in our fields.
  5. Cover the roots with soil and water them well. Keep them well watered for at least the first few weeks.

What to do later:

Keep your daylilies well watered:
Daylilies are drought tolerant, but giving them plenty of water is the most important thing you can do for best performance.

Fertilize

  1. When to fertilize – We recommend fertilizing in the spring, when most of the danger of frost has passed. Some folks also fertilize in the fall.
  2. What kind of fertilizer – Daylilies aren’t picky. We recommend that you use a general balanced fertilizer. They do like nitrogen, so you may consider supplementing with some additional nitrogen.
  3. How to fertilize – Just sprinkle granular fertilizer around the plants, or soak the plant and surrounding area if you’re using liquid fertilizer.
  4. Can you over-fertilize? Yes, but it’s kind of unusual. If you over-fertilize you may get lots of outstanding foliage, but few blooms. (This is kind of extreme, but we hear from a few folks each year in this situation.)

Mulching:

Mulch is great! It helps hold moisture in the soil and also helps keep weeds down. Daylilies aren’t particular, any common mulch material should be fine.

Dividing:

Daylilies don’t need to be divided every year. Most varieties can go 3-5 years (or longer) without needing to be divided.

  1. How will you know when to divide? If you notice your daylilies aren’t blooming as well as they used to, they may need to be divided.
  2. How to divide? Dividing daylilies is simple; you usually just need to dig them up and pull the plants apart. If they’re hard to pull apart, use a knife to pry or cut them apart. You’ll usually want to transplant a daylily clump with at least three fans (like the size we send) as smaller plants will take longer to bloom.

As always, we guarantee your complete satisfaction with your daylilies.

If you have questions or concerns, email [email protected], or call us at 865-687-3770.