Well, hello! Welcome to our very first blog post!  You’ll have to bear with me, I’m a little newer to blogging than I am to growing flowers.

On our about us page we told you a little of our story on how we became “Kathy’s Daylilies”.  For my first blog post I thought I would share how we purchased flowers for our garden, built our beds, planted and grew and grew and GREW!  This will show how an addiction for daylilies can really grow to the point where you might find yourself thinking, “Somthing’s got to give!”. 

People seemed to always ask us what our plans were as we were traveling and purchasing flowers.  I guess they’d ask this because we couldn’t stop ourselves from purchasing so many at the time.  As hard as we would try, we just couldn’t limit ourselves to only a few.  I hate when people ask me to pick my favorite.  I LOVE THEM ALL!!  That’s why we have so many.  And I guess the best answer I can come up with is that we actually had no plans.  We were just two people who set out to enjoy our hobby together and all the beauty it gave our home. Every time a new introduction came out we just had to have them.  You’d see one that you just knew would work in our hybridizing program.  Or someone would recommend one that was an awesome breeder.  At that time, the hybridizing was just a hobby also.  We just did it to see what we could do.  We had no idea that one day we’d have our very own introductions.

First came the beds around the house, which quickly spread into more beds around the front pines that line our yard.  Then for better or worse, we decided a tree had to come down for fear it would hit the house if it fell.  Well now, you ladies know how ugly that can make a spot.  So I told Bruce that it was a good spot to build a bed for daylilies.  So we built yet another bed and  of course we had to go buy more daylilies to fill it.  I mean thats the most obvious thing to do, right?  Well, it didn’t end there, after that project ended up becoming such a beautiful addition to the yard, Bruce decided we needed two more beds side by side next to the drive.  Now this time we took our time and we designed it to be a more unusual bed.  I don’t particularly like things to look like they were just stuck there.  That led to more, you guessed it, shopping for daylilies.  I seem to have an ability to find any eyesore in our yard to turn into a daylily bed.  “Oh Bruce, that’s just a hole that holds water sometimes and frogs!!”  I was tired of looking at that so, another extremely long bed was built.  Still didn’t seem like it was good enough, with more seedlings and more daylilies on the brain more beds were on the horizon.  I don’t want to continue to bore you with how many beds were built, but instead I’ll include a few pictures for you to gaze over of all the hard work.

Okay, beds are built and the summers are becoming hotter and hotter here in South Georgia.  So we decide that the hybridizing beds needed to be shaded.  Shade cloth then became a part of our world.  Still not good enough.  We were running out of room and it was getting time to divide our daylilies.  What were we going to do?  Pots!  Oh yes, the potting of daylilies began.  And trust me, if you’ve never done this, there is a knack to it.  First we had to clear an area for them, laying ground cover to keep weeds from growing up in them.  Did I tell you how much work this is for 2 “older” folks!!

Still running out of room, we gave flowers to friends, neighbors, daughter-in-law, her family, and even gifted some to our daylily club.  Anyone that wanted them, we were more than happy to share the love.  And I think that’s when we realized with all the expense we were putting out of pocket for such an elaborate “habit” or hobby if you will, we needed some sort of return on investment if we wanted to continue buying and growing daylilies.  This was a no brainier, like many of you, we knew we were not going to stop buying daylilies.  So the decision was made to become, Kathy’s Daylilies, and try to sell some of our daylilies.