This has been a very strange summer. Most of my flowers didn't bloom

[sofa king]

48. Mine flowered early, too.

We had a couple of nights of frost somewhere in late March which put the brakes on an absurdly early launch of spring. But it didn't stop the daylillies, some of which blossomed in mid-April for the first time, if I remember right. It sounds to me like your daylillies might be an older strain (well worth keeping, by the way) that only blooms once or maybe twice a year.

I don't want to lecture you or any other plant lover about watering, but this might be the place to put it out there for those who don't know:

Most potted plants, particularly those you buy at department and hardware stores, live horrid lives, root-bound in pots two sizes too small and amped up on plant-crack and perfectly regulated watering.

For most species you can buy at those places, you should disentangle or score the roots, dig out at least four inches around the diameter of the pot, give it a good dose of compost or other enriched soil, and soak it water it every day for weeks. (It helps a lot with good plants, too.)

The tangled root ball of a Wal-Plant simply doesn't have the footprint needed to collect the water it requires, and it will take weeks for it to sort out all its problems. If the plant is further weakened by disease (which is most Wal-Plants), lack of watering will knock one off in 72 hours after planting. A real plant from a real plant monger can handle a more reasonable level of neglect.

The real price y'all pay for saving two bucks on a shitty plant comes in the form of more water and more time spent watering, expensive fertilizer, and as often as not, replacement.

We pay the price, too. Perhaps a dozen of the thousands of plants we've sold and planted this year died and were replaced free of charge. But we have spent hundreds of hours performing remote triage on shitty Wal-Plants that aren't watered enough. We usually win the replacement fight, but if you came to us in the first place, we would all be happier.