Three Cheers for Daylilies!

I like for my garden to be attractive to people and pollinators, so I always mix flowers and vegetables together as much as possible. I've learned a lot about my flower priorities over the last few years, mainly that I like perennials that are easy to grow, able to handle our extreme North Alabama weather, and colorful. I don't have the energy or talent for fussy flowers when I'm trying to keep the tomatoes alive and it's 100 degrees outside. Luckily I found daylilies, thanks largely to some friends who offered us all we could transplant from their yard. Daylilies are basically the perfect flower, as far as I'm concerned. They come in all shapes, colors, and sizes, they're almost impossible to kill, and they look wonderful in clusters around the kitchen garden.

If you're afraid to start growing flowers because you don't have a "green thumb" and have had bad luck with houseplants, then daylilies are there for you. You can buy very inexpensive ones at your local garden center for less than $5 each. Plant them this spring once they show up at your area's stores and watch them thrive. They spread over time, which means you'll eventually have a robust cluster you can divide after 3-4 years to add to other parts of your garden. Other than that, they won't ask much of you, just a sunny spot in the yard. They're drought tolerant but won't mind a rainy week, either, and they aren't picky about soil types. Just make sure they get enough sun; my only daylily failures last year were in too much shade. The plants survived but did not bloom well, and we've now moved them to a sunnier spot in the new garden.

As I mentioned, I started with a few truck loads of free daylilies from a friend, and if you can get free ones then go for it. They survived and bloomed even when transplanted in the heat of July, and they came back stronger the second year. Most of our freebies were the commonly seen orange blooms sometimes derided as "ditch lilies"; they're all over neighborhoods here in Huntsville through the summer months. I was delighted to have them but soon found out about the breathtaking diversity of daylily varieties and wanted more. (Warning! Daylilies are habit forming and addictive!)

We headed to the local Lowe's and found another popular daylily, the yellow rebloomer Stella d'Oro. This is a solid first daylily if you are buying yours at a chain garden center, where you should get them for under $5 per pot. You will find other varieties as the season progresses; Happy Returns and Purple d'Oro both turn up at stores in our area, as well as a few others. Independent nurseries and garden centers will offer a wider variety; our local favorite is Bennett Nurseries, which stocks a wonderful selection of daylilies and other plants throughout the growing season. Many of the nicer daylilies at independent stores will run about $10 each, but they're worth it because they'll grow and thrive and spread without much fuss, giving you years of color and enjoyment.

Oakes Daylily Festival in Tennessee

Once I had exhausted the options at all of my local, physical stores, I started looking at daylilies online. Behold - a world of glorious daylilies is just a keyboard and a credit card away! Specialty growers can offer hundreds of varieties tailored to meet your specific garden needs. You can get short ones, tall ones, spider blooms, rebloomers, giant blooms, tiny blooms, and all in every color imaginable. My favorite online daylily company is Oakes Daylilies based in Tennessee. They even have an annual daylily festival at their farm, which we attended in 2019. It was really amazing, and we came home with lots of new plants for our garden!

The daylilies have become such a passion for us that we made sure we brought the best of them with us when we moved in October. All of our Oakes daylilies were dug up and moved to the new garden, and I'm eagerly waiting to see them bloom. We've interplanted them with daffodils and tulips for a long season of color, but there's room for more daylilies. We left the freebies and most of the Lowe's purchases at the old house to bloom for new owners, and I hope they'll enjoy them. I already have my eye on some new daylilies for 2020 and some new places to put them!

Learn more about daylilies!
American Meadows
Burpee
Gardener's Path

New House, New Garden

As I mentioned in my introductory post, I decided to start this kitchen blog because I moved to a new house in October 2019, which means I have a whole new garden to build and develop! Our new yard is much smaller than our old one, but with good planning and efficient use of the large patio area I should have plenty of room to grow quite a lot of vegetables and flowers.

The Challenges

This new house is less than five years old, which means the soil in the yard is pretty poor, with quite a bit of construction debris in the mix. Luckily, raised beds and containers are my preference, and the flowers I'll be planting directly into the ground aren't fussy. The small backyard has uneven ground and a long dogleg section, and other areas for planting are partial to full shade. I'll be learning a lot about shade loving plants this year!

The blank canvas in September 2019.

The Benefits

At our old house, we spent a lot of time on grounds maintenance in the very large, woody backyard that we could have spent growing flowers and vegetables. Our new yard has just enough space to grow things I want to have without the intense upkeep of a big yard with lots of trees and lawn. I like to think of it as more British allotment size than American yard size! The new backyard is also a blank canvas that I can plan and develop from scratch. We'll be working to make the established beds with the builder's usual suspects (dogwood, azalea, generic shrubs, liriope) more interesting, too, but there's also plenty of opportunity to develop those because we don't have a lot of old growth to clear first. I have a large patio area at the new house that I can fill with annuals and container gardens, and I have a lovely back porch where I can sit and enjoy the view during the warmer months.

Getting Started

The beginning of a garden in November 2019.

Our first job after moving was to transplant our beloved Oakes daylilies to the new yard and move some of the nicest of the garden boxes for the future raised beds. I brought over the big pot of mint and some rosemary plants grown from cuttings of my old rosemary, but the previous owner already planted rosemary in the front beds, so I'll have to think about the herb garden priorities come spring. We also bought about 100 daffodil and tulip bulbs and planted those in both the beds and the most sloped part of the backyard. We interplanted daffodils and tulips with early, mid, and late spring blooming seasons with the equally varied daylilies, which should mean that we have a colorful show for people and pollinators from early spring all the way to fall.

Garden boxes in January 2020 - late afternoon.

We also transplanted a beautiful Lady Banks rose from the old house, and so far it's doing well. Ideally it will grow over the naked fence and spread - we put up wiring to support it as it does. Our weird winter weather might wreck some of my plans; we've had cold and then spring like warmth and now a very cold snap again, just as all the plants had decided it really was spring.

We found a collection of leftover fence posts tucked behind the carport and upcycled them into raised beds along the back section of the yard. That area gets good sun but has buried cables under it, so we don't want to dig or plant anything with deep roots there. Those beds will be for the pollinator patch and other sturdy plants that don't need a lot of watering but do want more sun.

Current Progress Report - January 2020

It's now mid January of 2020, so much of the work is on hold until March, but I've got 4 raised garden boxes for vegetables, 3 long beds for pollinator flowers and various herbs, and two areas in the backyard devoted to daylilies and daffodils. As we wait for spring I'll be collecting containers for my patio garden, ordering seeds and bulbs, and drawing up plans. In my next post I'll talk about the vegetables and flowers I most want to grow in the new garden!

Welcome to Jenn's Kitchen Garden!

Summer 2019 in the old garden

Hello! My name is Jenn, and I'm an amateur backyard gardener in North Alabama (Zone 7). This blog is meant to serve as a record of my gardening journey and hopefully provide some insights and fun posts for friends, family, and anyone interested in growing vegetables and flowers in a small backyard space.

I'm starting this blog now - January 2020 - because I just moved to a new house with a completely blank space as far as the backyard garden is concerned. Over the next year or two I hope to make this space special! I'm moving from a much larger yard with two years of kitchen garden experience behind me, but I still have a lot to learn as a gardener and expect to make plenty of mistakes along the way.

I'll be letting you know about my successes and failures as I work to transform the new space into a small kitchen garden with lots of flowers for our pollinators and my own enjoyment. Please leave comments whenever you have questions or advice!