Friday, August 19, 2011

Collecting hosta and daylily seeds

It's a little early to think about collecting hosta and daylily seeds, or so I thought.  One of my hostas already has seedpods that are starting to burst, so I thought I would post on how to collect hosta and daylily seeds.  Neither hostas nor daylily come true from seed, which means that they will not look like the parent plant.  It all depends on how the flowers were pollinated.  In hostas a majority of the seeds will produce a plain green plant, but you never know when you might grow a desirable plant.  I collect seeds and put them in labeled paper envelopes with the name of the plant I collected them from.  Both hosta and daylily seeds need a time of cool dormancy.  So I usually store the seeds in my unheated garaged until January (or later) when I am ready to plant them.
These are seeds pods on a hosta that are not ready for collection yet.  They are still green.

Notice these seed pods are brown and starting to crack open, these seed pods are ready for seed collection.

Close-up of a seed pod that's ready for collection.

These are the hosta seeds inside of the seedpods.

This is a seedpod on a daylily, it is not ripe enough for seed collecting.

This is a ripe seed pod, you can easily shake the seeds out.

Close-up of daylily seed (black one).

These are the bulbils on a tiger lily. 

Not the greatest picture, but I was trying to show the bulbils are ready to pick when you start to notice roots coming off the bulbils.  The small white line coming off the bulbils is a root.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

so do the bulbs from the tiger lily also need cold storage before planting?

Hosta Nerd said...

I usually just stick them right in the ground. It takes them about 3-4 years to flower from planting the bulbil.

Unknown said...

i have collected daylily seeds for years and have had great results,i have hostas as well and have never seen a pod on any of them,just curious as to what the new hostas would look like