Garden slip-ups are, without a doubt, one of the easiest topics for me to write about since I have single-handedly made just about every blunder that a gardener possibly could. As I've mentioned in earlier blogs, I did not grow up in a gardening family; my love of perennials came unexpectedly out of left field. Without a mentor I learned to garden by the trial-and-error method. Some of my gardening ideas worked (luck), but many others were an epic fail. It was then that I borrowed books from the library. The gardening books helped me achieve a much better outcome. And why is it that we never read instructions until we screw up or can't figure something out? Human nature, I guess.

Here are a few of the things I've learned (the hard way):

1. Pay attention to the actual width and height of a mature plant listed on the plant tag. Failure to do this causes extra work. The plant is no longer cute when it's massive and crowding out all the other adjacent plants.
2. Pay attention to the hardiness zone on the perennial plant tag. I live in Zone 4B and often see Zone 5 perennials for sale in our area. When buying plants, don't be swayed by a pretty face. Yes, they may survive during a mild winter or perhaps they will do okay if planted in a protected place, but don't expect them to stick around for the long haul. If you do buy out-of-zone, consider the plant an annual from the get-go so you're not heartbroken when it dies.
3. Pay attention to the sun exposure on the perennial plant tag. Here's specifically what these terms mean in terms of actual numbers -- very important!
   *  Full sun - More than 6 hours of direct sunlight.
   *  Part sun - 4-6 hours of direct sunlight. Afternoon sun is usually better (hotter).
   *  Part shade - 4-6 hours of direct sunlight. Morning sun is usually better (less hot)
   *  Shade - Less than 4 hours of direct sunlight.
4. Resist impulse buying. Before I buy anything, my rule is that I must have a place to put it. Cramming a plant anywhere doesn't do it justice, or the plants that already live in the flower bed you are cramming it into.
5. Planning ahead is best practice and really does save extra work down the road. If you don't want to do it twice, plan ahead.
6. Steer clear of walnut trees - There are several walnut trees surrounding our property. Their roots produce a substance called juglone that can be toxic to many plants. Luckily, my daylilies aren't bothered, but many of my other plants have a major problem with juglone. Also, be careful not to let walnut leaves sneak into your compost.
   
7. Never get lazy about spraying deer deterrent. You can't ever be too tired...it only takes one evening for a few deer to take out an entire flower bed full of blooms you've waited all year to see.
   

Daylily pictured: Grey Witch

Grateful living is happy living. Every year at this time I like to take time to reflect on things that made me smile or feel grateful over the past year. Here's my list:

• Buying an item at a garage sale and a week later finding a gift card tucked inside. After checking the balance online, it was never used! Regretfully, after going to 20+ garage sales seven days prior, I was clueless  as to which house it came from. So all I can say is "Much obliged indeed!"
• Being able to have some great laughs! And a laugh is so much better when I can get it at my husband Ange's expense. I must preface this story by saying that our four-year-old grandson is obsessed with bodily functions, especially burps and farts. Since Ange is just a grown-up version of a four-year-old, he downloaded a 'fart app' on his iPhone which our grandson L-O-V-E-S. Here's the funny part; after Ange and I spent an afternoon with our grandson, on the way home we stopped at an evening garage sale. You're familiar with pocket-dialing? Well, while Ange was looking at garage sale items (in a small garage filled with people), the iPhone fart app activated in his pants pocket, and the volume was not low. You should have seen the people scatter!
• Receiving an unexpected gift of an entire pound of high-end chocolates from a specialty shop in Oshkosh. Definitely my guilty pleasure! I ate nothing but chocolates that evening for dinner. Best.meal.ever.
• My eight-year-old granddaughter asked me if I was aware of the fact that by the time she's a teenager, I would probably be dead. You gotta love this girl :)
• Getting the gift of a perfect September day that coincided with a day off from work. The local weather had forecast thunderstorms and rain all day, when in fact it turned into a beautiful day with temperatures in the low 70s. Gardening heaven!
• Finding a division of a daylily I had admired in my friend's garden potted up and sitting by my car at the end of a work day.
• Our brother-in-law is a rock star. After two brain surgeries, lung cancer, chemo, radiation, and heart bypass surgery (all in the course of a few years) his sense of humor and resilience is nothing short of amazing. He also makes me think twice before complaining about anything.
• I know this will be hard to believe, but before 2018 I had never seen the sitcom 'Friends.' So over a six-month period I watched the entire ten seasons on Netflix. The best part was that every single episode made me laugh! And who doesn't need a happy place to go to at the end of the day?
• Ange and I have had the same card-playing group for over 20 years. Cards have become quite comical as of late. We are spending more and more of our time figuring out who dealt last, who laid down the last card, and who the heck snuck Canadian money into the pot. Thankfully, none of this interferes with having a guaranteed good time with lots of laughter.
• Finally, I'm so grateful that Ange always takes time to help me out in the garden. He says he hates flowers, but just between us, I kind of think he's playing me.

Pictured above: Minneapolis sophisti-cat 'Sophie,' a shelter rescue who now lives the life of a princess

The human eye can distinguish between millions of different colors. Regardless of whether you are familiar with color theory or color wheels, most gardeners just know or feel when certain color combinations work together and other combinations don't. And much of that 'know-or-feel' has to do with personal preference. Some gardeners love the monochromatic look (all white flowers, for instance), while others may just plant pastels, or perhaps vibrant oranges, yellows and reds. Any of these looks can be very appealing. Your garden visitors may think it was pure luck that the colors, sizes and shapes all go together and look great. I'll admit there are moments of serendipity when perfectness just happens, but most of us gardeners work very hard to have our plants play nicely together.

Every summer I run around the garden picking blooms and comparing them with other blooms, trying to determine which color combos go together best. This is why I juggle plants around every fall; I keep trying to make what I think looks good, better. For this reason I keep detailed information about every plant that I grow, including each plant's size, bloom time (start-to-finish), bloom size, and color. So in addition to my personal preferences, I use data to help me make decisions. And herein lies the challenge...even when you have all of this information at your disposal, Mother Nature provides variances. You can make an educated guess about what you think should happen, but ultimately she holds the reins! That being said, Mother Nature never stops me from continually trying to get it right.

Pictured: Daylily 'Spacecoast Cherries and Cream' with its companion 'Echinacea Double Delight'

After a long winter, which continued through the month of April, gardening in Wisconsin proves to be an exercise in delayed gratification. And there's nothing whatsoever I can do -- Mother Nature has the reins. My job is to move the plants around, get rid of the weeds, add mulch, and wait. Looking around the garden, I see lots and lots of scapes, but hardly any flowers yet. Is it really the end of June? The *wait* part is getting harder and harder by the day. So it looks like delayed gratification isn't my only issue; add whining to the list!

Pictured is my old faithful 'Moonlit Masquerade,' one of only four daylilies blooming in my yard on June 24.

The great thing about growing daylilies is that no matter what your income level is, you can find one to fit your budget. There are so many exceptional daylilies available that you can purchase for $10 and under. And on the other end of the spectrum, there are trend-setting daylilies you can buy for up to $300. After a daylily has been out on the open market for a while, the purchase price gradually decreases over time as new cultivars are introduced each year.

When I was first bitten by the daylily bug my kiddos were in elementary school. At that time I remember feeling guilty that I spent more money than I should have on a daylily. Should I have bought school clothes instead? I ultimately decided that the new daylily made me a happier Mom. How's that for rationalization?

Although I'm still not in a place to afford triple-digit daylily prices, that doesn't dampen my enthusiasm by any means. I just have to wait a little longer to get what's on my wish list. As it stands right now, I am perfectly happy getting the seven and eight-year-old daylilies. As each year passes, hybridizers come up with more and more innovative, cutting-edge daylilies. Consequently, there is always yet another daylily that I must have -- it's a never-ending cycle.

Pictured: Daylily 'Signs and Wonders.'  At the time I bought this pretty, it was my biggest splurge to date. Sorry? Not really.

It's one thing to have a flower garden, and quite another to keep it weed-free. Simplifying my garden over the last two years has saved me so much time and effort. Since I don't like clutter, I'm not sentimental about what I keep and what I don't keep. I made the decision to focus on my daylilies, because they are what I truly love. I only have a finite amount of time available to keep things looking nice so I made some changes. Here's what I did:

Removed the 40 foot long split-rail fence. Fences are weed magnets. What a back-breaker crawling under and around a fence trying to remove weeds. This never bothered me 20 years ago, but that was then and this is now. Ange helped me pull the fence posts out, fill up the holes with dirt, and haul the fence posts and rails away with our John Deere lawn tractor. Best decision ever! In addition, there is much more air flow for my daylilies which they have really responded to.

Goodbye Garden Phlox. Garden phlox are fragrant and pretty from a distance, but up close they were -- I'll just say 'not pretty.' Every year they got powdery mold and mildew. I was not willing to put in the time to get rid of the mold and mildew year-after-year. As they grew and spread they would get entangled with Creeping Charlie and crabgrass; then the ticks moved in.

Ditto to Bee Balm. I know hummingbirds and butterflies love them, but unfortunately I don't. They have tender shallow little roots that constantly got tangled up with weeds. I got tired of re-planting them each time I weeded and accidentally pulled them out. They got powdery mold and mildew too , even in full sun.

The flowers in the above two photos are long gone. Last summer was the first time that weeding was easily doable. And I thought my garden was still beautiful, even without the fence, the phlox and the bee balm.

Persistence is a trait that those of us who garden are very well-versed in. There's not much about a garden that doesn't involve hard core persistence. You may love flowers. You may imagine having flowers. You may have motivation. But in the end, it's persistence that does all the hard work.

Since I learned to garden by the trial and error method, I've had countless failures along the way. My thumb doesn't always glow green. Far from it! But I do find that with continued effort I can eventually achieve the end product I imagined, or pretty darn close to it.

     “Success is not the absence of failure; it's the persistence through failure.”   ~ Aisha Tyler

Persistence will be rewarded. My flowers thank me every year. And it is beyond exciting when the blooms arrive!

Pictured: Daylily 'Andy Candy'

I've learned that it's the small things that are important in life, as is living gratefully. Since the year is winding down, I took a look back and came up with ten moments of 2017 that made me feel grateful. Here they are:

1. Finding my favorite treat on the copy room table at the office. Work is always better with treats!
2. Receiving 'Daylily Dollars' to spend at the 2017 Daylily Society Sale. Daylily dollars look like Monopoly money, only with daylilies on it. Believe me, it's much more fun to buy daylilies than a plastic hotel for Park Avenue.
   
3. Putting my coat on and finding $5 in the pocket that I forgot all about.
4. Getting all psyched-up to get a cracked molar drilled for a crown and finding out, after the drilling started, that it was only a surface crack that  a 15-minute filling would remedy just fine. Can it get better than this?
5. Finding out that my 7-year-old granddaughter got caught by her Dad asking 'Alexa' for all the answers while doing Math homework. There's nothing wrong with her problem-solving skills! Where was Alexa when I had Math homework?
6. Hearing my 3-year-old grandson say "I help!" And smiling, knowing full-well what that really means...
7. Playing Rummy Royal with friends and laughing so hard that we cry -- the 'duh' moments seem to be increasing.
8. Being asked for the thousandth time if my dear friend Sandy and I are sisters. The best one happened a few weeks ago when Sandy and I were together with Susie, her actual sister. Susie was told  "No, you can't possibly be her sister -- she is!" (as the person pointed to me). This has occurred constantly over the years. May the years continue.
9. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, TACOS, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
10. And finally, Ange; he always keeps me smiling in a sometimes non-smiling world.
    
    

And how about your ten moments? What are you grateful for?

Pictured: My fashionista-granddaughter's feet/shoes. She can 'up-style' absolutely anything!

Now that the cold weather has arrived in Wisconsin, my ability to imagine is the only garden activity that is going on. And I can do 'imagine.' I'm well into my favorite activity of list-making to keep track of what needs to happen in my garden during 2018. After all, you've got to have a plan before you can make things happen. I'm sure many, if not all of you gardeners have a similar mindset.

Here's what I've come up with so far:

1. What plants do I want to cull? (None really, but if I want some new ones this must happen.)
2. What plants need to be moved to different locations?
3. What is working well in my garden and what is not?
4. Narrow down my daylily 'wish list' to an affordable amount
   
5. Replace any plant labels that are looking rough
6. Update my garden maps to reflect what changed during 2017
   
7. Organize the hundreds of garden photos I took over the summer
8. Get my annual seeds put away that are currently drying on cookie sheets
   
9. Take some time to visit some online daylily sites
   
10. And finally, imagine what's in store for next year's bloom season
    

Pictured: A close-up of the double daylily 'Buckeye Barnstormer'

Over the years I've grown some of my own daylily seedlings. And to be honest, most of them were disappointingly pedestrian. One thing for sure, it gave me a glimpse of the scope involved in hybridizing an award-winning daylily -- all the hours of research, pollinating, seed collecting, planting, weeding and evaluating. What a methodical, detailed labor of love it is.

So I'm that person who does nothing more than grow, enjoy, and appreciate the daylilies. How wonderful for me, that I can simply pick out a daylily--any size, color, or shape--whatever my heart desires. I can simply purchase, plant, and behold the beauty. It can't get any easier than that. I'm glad there are so many hybridizers out there doing all of the really hard work; call me grateful!

Pictured: Daylily 'Raspberry Goosebumps'

Logically, I know plant performance boils down to what zone you live in, weather/temperature, soil quality, fertilizer, water, and exposure to sun. In addition there are differences between evergreen, semi-evergreen, and dormant daylilies. But honestly, there are days I could swear a few of my daylilies have attitudes. The adage "bloom where you are planted" holds true for the vast majority of my plants, but there are definitely some holdouts. I can transplant one daylily and it joyfully continues to bloom away, seemingly unaffected by the change. I can do the same with another, and it will be sensitive, pout for a year and maybe even forego blooming entirely,  just to let me know that it is not happy with the change.

Just as attitude is important in the workplace, it is in my garden is as well. I like to keep my daylily family well-adjusted, happy, and all working toward the same mission -- unbridled bloom!

Pictured is 'Betty Woods,' a dormant, diploid double. She is most certainly beautiful, but despite her multiple awards Betty was a poster child for an indifferent attitude in my garden. After years of temperamental behavior she was adopted by my friend Becky. I am happy to report that she appears to be much happier in Becky's garden. Oddly enough, sometimes that's all it takes.

As much as gardening makes me happy, there are a few things I find somewhat annoying.
Here's my top ten:

1. Checking the weather to make sure rain is NOT in the forecast. Spending half-an-hour spraying deer deterrent on all my flowers while it's sunny. Hearing thunder in the distance not two hours later, followed by a rainstorm that lasts only long enough to wash off all the deer deterrent.
2. Planting a new perennial and finding it the next day all chewed up and lying on top of the soil about a foot away from where it was planted.
3. Constantly digging walnut trees out of my flower garden. I do not love walnut trees; thank you very much squirrels.
4. Moles burrowing underneath my new daylily babies and heaving them out of the ground.
5. Finding a dead, rotting whatever in my flower garden.
6. Watching a bunny eating a daylily scape that I can't get to quick enough.
7. Same as #6, but replace the word 'bunny' with 'deer.'
8. Japanese beetles 'doing the nasty' on my daylilies. Really?
9. May gardening in my winter coat. I love Wisconsin.
10. W.E.E.D.S.

Pictured: Daylily 'Green Mystique' inundated with Japanese beetles

Peak bloom is over in Wisconsin, even though some of my late daylilies are still blooming. For whatever reason, my garden never seems to grow exactly the way I planned or imagined it to. As hard as I try, there are always those areas that need to be fixed. Sound familiar? As the season winds down, I have started my list for fall transplanting and dividing. It's my annual attempt to make my flower garden look even better next year. Those of you who garden know how painstaking the decisions can be. Especially when you are dealing with the ever-present trifecta of size, color, and bloom time being different for each individual plant. In addition, there are so many variations in soil and location (even within my own yard) that can impact the plant's growth, not to mention weather and temperature!

Questions I have asked myself:

• How did that daylily grow six inches taller than its description? I can't see the plant behind it!
  
• Why did this one only grow 25" instead of the anticipated 35"?
  
• Who planted THAT plant there? Couldn't have been me...
• Did a mole burrow underneath this poor daylily?
  
• What was I thinking when I put those two peach plants next to each other?
• Did I really manage to leave an open space in the garden with no bloom in mid-July?

I rest assured knowing that Mother Nature always gives me a second (third, and fourth) chance to get it right. So as long as I'm able, I'll just keep on trying...thanks Mom!

Pictured: Daylily 'Carnival in Mexico'