How To Grow Daylilies From Proliferations

How To Grow Daylilies from Proliferations

When we first started growing daylilies, I was surprised to see funny little projections from the scapes of some daylilies.  So I went to my handy, dandy book and found that these are called proliferations.  

They are actually identical to the parent plant and can be cut off and rooted to become a new daylily plant.  On some of them you will see a root starting to form if you peel back the foliage at the base of the proliferation. Last fall we harvested about 250 of them. As we were cutting the scapes we wrote the name on each scape to identify the plant that they came from.  Next we trimmed off the scape above and below the proliferation.

 

We next stuck the cut off proliferations in plastic cups that we labeled with the daylily name and added weak fertilizer water. 

We placed these plastic cups in an east window until the roots began to grow.

When we noticed roots growing, we dumped out the water, cut slits in the bottom of the cups and filled the cups with potting soil into which we placed each proliferation.  Back they went into an east window.  We continued to water them with weak fertilizer water until we could see the roots at the bottom of the cup.  See-thru cups allow you to see the roots growing.

Once we saw the roots growing we took them out of the window and placed them outside for the rest of the summer. Around October they went into our sales shop which is an unheated space and spent the winter in front of the window.  

For the cultivars that are indicated as “dormant” the leaves died back. The cultivars that are indicated as “semi-evergreen” or "evergreen" kept their foliage throughout the winter. We watered them when they seemed to be dry to keep the roots moist.  In April they started to  send up new shoots.  

 In mid-April the root structure was developing nicely so we transplanted them into quart pots and continued to keep them inside until the weather warmed.

When the weather warmed we placed the pots outside to allow the root structure to continue to grow. 

These are some of the plants at the beginning of June ready to be transplanted into the garden. 

We hope that if you spot these “funny projections” on your daylily plants that you will take the opportunity to try our method and see if you can grow another daylily just like the one you cut it from.

Written by Tim Saksa — Saksa Daylily Farm