Last year, as readers might recall, I planted seeds I had gotten when I ‘married’ some daylillies out in my garden. I got little plants, which I put into pots for the summer last year and then toward the end of the summer, I planted them out into their own little nursery bed. Saving and Growing Your Own The photo at the top is of them, this morning – and boy, how THEY have grown. They are probably three times the size of what they were when I planted them out. Last summer, while the little daylilly plants were busy growing, I did some more ‘marrying’ on the daylillies in my garden and saved those seeds in a dry paper towel inside a plastic bag in my fridge. Earlier this spring, I again put them into one of my handy-dandy ‘plastic box with a snap on lid that I got some salad mix in from the grocery store’ and those, too, have come up. I will plant those into pots with grow mix and at the end of this summer, I will put those into the nursery bed. I will also transplant the daylillies that you see in the photo above into more permanent spots at the front of our house. They are probably a good two years away from flowering but part of the fun of this is the waiting part.
And in other gardening news, I dragged myself to the seedbed, whipped off the row cover and saw this: 
A veritable forest of greens, Chinese cabbages, Japanese greens, beets, and chard. And not a moment too soon, I might add. Some things, such as greens, can grow all crowded up like that, but they do better with a bit of space between plants. Root crops, such as beets and carrots need to be heavily and rigorously thinned; otherwise, you don’t get anything worth even talking about. The weather this past week has been rainy and cool, but the sun has now come out and they just jumped out of the ground. Seriously – even cool weather crops like this will take a bit of sunshine and just run with it. I had a bit of one of the other beds available, so I dug up all the spinach, Japanese greens, Chinese cabbages and chard and spaced them out into the bed, with a 4-6″ spacing between each little plant. The chard seedlings have just come up and made their second set of leaves, so they were really tiny and had to handled very carefully but because they are relatively young, they will probably settle in quicker than the other little plants. 
Since it is so sunny today, I gave them quite a bit of water and also covered them with some spun polyester row cover so that they won’t dry out and die. Another benefit of this row cover seems to be that if the ever-present ground hogs and bunnies can’t see what’s in the garden bed, it’s invisible. They’ve been very active out there but they have not gone after anything in the bed with the row cover on it. Tonight, I’ll go back out and rearrange the rest of the seedlings in the seedling bed and give them more space as well.
