Rot and Spring Sickness

Here in Arkansas we , as far as i know, dont have Spring Sickness. My friend Sara in Ohio asked me a couple weeks ago if we got it here? Maybe because we have breaks in the cold weather with warm fronts all winter.

We here in the South have Rot. Where you can have a row of different cultivers and one rots. What causes that, i am not sure. Now i will give you my thoughts on this and i hope i will get some response from some of you. I have had daylilies start to yellow in the summer when temps get hot and usually when there is not a lot of rain. I will put a handful of pelletized lime all around the plant close to the plant and water it in for a couple days and a big part of the time the plant send out new growth out from under the crown, but i will lose the yellowing plant. I think it is a PH problem that those little parasites(bulb mites) eat holes all in the crown and bacteria gets in and kills the plant. Now i think some plants are more prone to rot than others. But i still think it can be averted with a little change in the PH. I have heard some folks talk of pouring on a bleach solution to kill the rot. Maybe it does but when you add the bleach solution have you changed the PH?

Heres what i am asking those that are seeing or those that do get Spring Sickness, take an area of your garden and take pictures before and after of the area where you have in the past had Spring Sickness and ADD some pelletized lime to this area and dont be stingy with it. In the next 30 days let me hear from you on the difference if there is one. My email is

woostergrdn@windstream.net Lets stop this problem before it gets started.

The above tet seedling is from Shores of Time X Forestlake Ragmuffin. As the temperatures get hotter the teeth get bigger and the gold edge gets wider. Was i lucky, sometimes it just happens to turn out right. I have seen teeth on Shores of Time in the past but i never persuded it because i wasnt into the teeth plants so i had to try it just once and it worked. This was a Short Cross because so few seeds were produced from this crossing of these 2 plants. Now a Long Cross is when i will load up on the pod parent with pods from the same pollen and have maybe 25 seeds or more.

Here is an example of a Long Cross. I have a purple dip seedling numbered UP-4, short scape but still above the folage, very good branching. This is the pod parent. Now for the pollen parent i use a creamy white named Carribean Whipped Cream from Dave Talbot. The clump of UP-4 had about 30 pods on it from CWC and my wife was getting tired of using the same pollen and wanted to change, thank goodness she didnt change pollen parents. I wanted to get a pure purple 7 inch seedling from the cross. I did get the big purple seedling. But it was lost and never made it to the new house and garden. There was a period of a couple years where we built the new house and was making gardens for the plants. We have purples but not that big one we wanted but i am still trying. I will say in that purple and cream cross i got so many eyed seedlings and lots of pinks and pinks with eyes. We just never know when we spread that pollen what we will get. Its all about hopes and dreams. Now that would be a good name!! Hopes and Dreams!! Dont forget to try the pelletized lime. Jim Elliott