a very long set-up...
... for a punchline that no one but me will find funny. You've been warned!
So a couple years ago, I became fascinated with daylily hybridizing. Daylilies are awesome flowers: bright, cheerful, and nearly unkillable, and they have a rich enough genome that you can end up with a wonderful diversity of colors, shapes, heights, bloom times, etc. And when you cross two existing daylily varieties, each seed that you get in the resulting seed pod has a different combination of genes (like a litter of kittens) -- you may end up with several plants that are near twins of each other, or each offspring may look radically different from its siblings.
So I bought a bunch of daylily seeds from the Lily Auction in the winter of 2009/2010. I started them in little pots inside, early in the spring of 2010 and planted them out in the garden later that summer. The should have bloomed for the first time throughout the spring/summer of 2011, but we were so busy with disasters that I didn't have a chance to spray them with Liquid Fence, and the deer ate every single flower bud. Also, I didn't have the time to plant the seeds that I'd bought in winter 2010/2011, and I was pretty much so depressed about everything that I just put daylilies from my mind for the rest of the year.
Now it is spring again, and I am ready! I will keep the deer away if I have to camp out with a shotgun! I will finally see what my seedlings look like!
And I have also been catching up with what my favorite hybridizers have been up to in the past couple years, which brings me to Captain America. See, there is a whole lot of technical info that goes into the description of each new daylily variety: the foliage may be evergreen or it may go dormant in the winter, the flowers may open in the morning or the evening, they may bloom at one time of year or repeat all summer, etc. And there are standard abbreviations for these terms.
So it cracked me up to read the technical description for the recent Captain America daylily variety:
Dip 44" Mid season Dormant emo fr 7.5" 3-4 way branching 18-22 buds. Fertile both ways.
He's dormant! He's emo! (That stands for "early morning opening".) He's fertile both ways! (That means he provides fertile pollen and sets fertile seeds).
It's like a whole fanfic in one cryptic line of text! *g*
This entry was originally posted at http://loligo.dreamwidth.org/429206.html.
comments on that entry. Comments on Dreamwidth preferred.
So a couple years ago, I became fascinated with daylily hybridizing. Daylilies are awesome flowers: bright, cheerful, and nearly unkillable, and they have a rich enough genome that you can end up with a wonderful diversity of colors, shapes, heights, bloom times, etc. And when you cross two existing daylily varieties, each seed that you get in the resulting seed pod has a different combination of genes (like a litter of kittens) -- you may end up with several plants that are near twins of each other, or each offspring may look radically different from its siblings.
So I bought a bunch of daylily seeds from the Lily Auction in the winter of 2009/2010. I started them in little pots inside, early in the spring of 2010 and planted them out in the garden later that summer. The should have bloomed for the first time throughout the spring/summer of 2011, but we were so busy with disasters that I didn't have a chance to spray them with Liquid Fence, and the deer ate every single flower bud. Also, I didn't have the time to plant the seeds that I'd bought in winter 2010/2011, and I was pretty much so depressed about everything that I just put daylilies from my mind for the rest of the year.
Now it is spring again, and I am ready! I will keep the deer away if I have to camp out with a shotgun! I will finally see what my seedlings look like!
And I have also been catching up with what my favorite hybridizers have been up to in the past couple years, which brings me to Captain America. See, there is a whole lot of technical info that goes into the description of each new daylily variety: the foliage may be evergreen or it may go dormant in the winter, the flowers may open in the morning or the evening, they may bloom at one time of year or repeat all summer, etc. And there are standard abbreviations for these terms.
So it cracked me up to read the technical description for the recent Captain America daylily variety:
Dip 44" Mid season Dormant emo fr 7.5" 3-4 way branching 18-22 buds. Fertile both ways.
He's dormant! He's emo! (That stands for "early morning opening".) He's fertile both ways! (That means he provides fertile pollen and sets fertile seeds).
It's like a whole fanfic in one cryptic line of text! *g*
This entry was originally posted at http://loligo.dreamwidth.org/429206.html.
comments on that entry. Comments on Dreamwidth preferred.