Deadheading Daylilies

So I have a whole pile of yellow daylilies that I got from an acquaintance before she decided to defriend on me on facebook.  Since we are no longer in contact, I have no idea what these daylilies are.  They look similar to the Stella d'oros I see all over the state, but the color is a little off.  These seem to have a bit more orange in them than the Stella d'oros.  I was frustrated though because I could see the Stellas blooming and reblooming and reblooming all over, but mine had one nice blooming session of a few weeks and then stopped blooming for at least a month.

I was not a huge fan of daylilies our first two summers here, but the way those freebie daylilies exploded into gorgeousness this summer got me very excited about daylilies, and I've started looking much more closely at stores and people's daylilies and doing research online about daylilies.  I subscribe to the Iowa Gardener mailing list, and her last e-mail had a link to a video about how to deadhead daylilies.  After watching that I watched several related videos and a few of those videos indicated that if you don't cut off the stalk after the daylily forms seeds on it, you won't get reblooms.  So I've been cursing my daylilies for the past month when its been my own damn fault they weren't reblooming.

With this new knowledge, I trudged down to our nearest Harbor Freight and bought some pruning sheers rated for 1 in. vines/plants/greenery.  I brought them home and attacked all of the dead stalks on our daylilies.  I usually do my gardening at night once the kids are settled in for the night, or at least sleepy enough to not run into the street or steal my pruning sheers.  So I missed a lot of the stalks because they are hard to see in the dark.  A week or so later, one of my noid daylilies that I planted this year (from either a clearance bin at a store with no tags or a freebie someone off of craigslist selling dayliles) sent up a new stalk and bloomed a pretty stella-esque bloom today.  I am pretty sure its not actually a Stella though because it started blooming in late afternoon and was going strong in the opening side of things around midnight, so I am pretty sure it is a nocturnal daylily, not a diurnal like I think the Stellas are.

Anyway, the moral of the story is to read, watching, listen, and observe a lot about gardening.  I stumbled onto those videos just by being generally curious about daylilies and I am reaping the benefits!