|
Daylilies
back to Ramblings
t wasn’t so long ago, June to be exact, when the scads of daylilies we have around here were at the height of their bloom.
 |
at the height of their beauty
|
We have this one in particular, a “double” orange blossom, that is Butterfly’s favorite. She likes any flower that is a double, figuring, I think, that you’re getting more bang for your buck.
If you know anything about daylilies, you know they multiply like rabbits. We started with probably a dozen of these orange beauties years ago when a neighbor was looking to get rid of them and now we have, as I said, scads of them. Don’t ask me to define “scads” – I just know it’s a lot. We’ve added a few of our own to get some other colors that we like, but it’s these orange ones that dominate the landscape.
In an attempt to get our daylily beds thinned out, Butterfly has offered to any number of people the opportunity to come harvest some of our daylilies. The catch is that they must come do their own digging. Daylilies are not easy to dig out of the ground, especially our unforgiving, rock-infested ground. Some people have actually taken her up on the offer and shown up. They stay for an hour or two and actually make a valiant attempt at fighting the earth for some of the plants, with Butterfly standing by, instructing. Then we never see them again. Funny how that works.
As with all flowering plants, once the blooming season is over, something must be done with the “leftovers” (some type of dead-heading). With daylilies, you have the dried sticks poking up that must be cut down, or, if you wait long enough, simply pulled out of the plants. Otherwise you have a bit of an eyesore going on in your garden.
One year Butterfly said, “I wonder if these sticks would work as kindling for your fires in the winter?”
It sounded like a fine idea to me, and it seemed like such a waste to dump these huge mounds of dried sticks on our “quail pile” (the pile of garden cuttings we leave in one field for the birds to hide in). So that year we carefully stashed all the daylily sticks in buckets in our shed, and I gave them a try as “fire starters” when building new fires in our wood stove.
They worked beautifully. A recipe of 2 or 3 crumpled pieces of newspaper, some daylily sticks, some bark, a few small sticks of wood, and voilá – you have fire! Butterfly’s a genius.
Sometimes you just don’t have enough bark or small pieces of wood, but I always have plenty of daylily sticks.
 |
the first of many loads of wood for the winter
|
Now it is “that” time of year again, which means time for fires in the wood stove now that the evenings have turned cold. I have started piling the firewood on the back deck, and stashing some of the daylily sticks nearby.
Bring on winter! Thanks to Butterfly, we’re prepared.
| Request an E-mail Alert for New Blogs! |
|
|
|
|
|
