Daylily... best varieties for eating and where to get them

Since a lot of my gardening happens in my suburban front yard, I'm really big on edible landscaping. Daylillies are so easy to grow that in many some gardeners describe them as a weed. Not quite that easy here, but still very easy. I've tasted the flower buds and agree with my nieces that at least the "stella d'oro" variety tastes like lettuce. Supposedly the spent flowers are traditionally used in soup in China and I've heard that the root forms a tasty edible tuber. Except for taste testing the flower buds, this is all 'stuff I learned on the internet.' Does anyone here have actual experience with growing these for food?

here they are called ditch lilies
and that is where I collect flower buds when up in the mountains
plus I harvest as much as I dare off of the ones in my yard

dining on daylilies

I'm curious what the dare is in harvesting the ones from your yard? Are you constrained by neighborhood expectations like I feel or some other reason?

I want them to thrive and multiply
if I eat them all ...

so I rather eat the ones that grow along some lonesome mountain road
and spare mine

Okay, I can see that. I'm thinking of using them at the base of my espaliered fruit trees in the front yard. Tuber tasting wouldn't happen until they start trying to escape the beds.
I saw the bare root plants have arrived at the nurseries, which is what prompted my question. I think I'm gonna be planting daylillies tomorrow.

Thank you for confirming both them being edible, and vigorous.

I love ditch lilies. They grow well under black walnuts that tend to kill everything else. I have some steep ditch banks I used to graze that I stabilized with lilies and they would produce 6-8" of good grazing for goats and sheep when the red fescue was just waking up in the semi shaded cold areas!! I could graze off 50-60% of initial leaf growth, allow it to regrow and it would shoot full flowers and continue to spread every year. I'm going to cut off the top 1/2 of leaf growth this year when it hits 8-10" and feed it to rabbits and see if it kills them or grows them! I suspect it will be a good front yard guerilla grazer technique.

I've got several feral patches in the vicinity of my yard, though I haven't much propagated them except to spread a few clumps with my shovel. I've got a thread here showing pictures of the tubers, if you're curious what those look like:

https://permies.com/t/34208/soil/Edibles-feral-Day-Lilies-growing

I find the buds very tasty and I especially like the lower portion of the stems, the part that is white like a leek at the base. The tubers also taste good but they are pretty small to be messing with in my opinion.

One word of warning: some of the herbals and wild food guides I consulted contained vague imprecations against eating "too many" day lilies. Not much useful was on offer as to what was "too much" or what the negative consequence might be. I ate them in small quantities with no problems. Then came the day I decided to make a substantial salad of day lily stems, redbud flowers, and native pecans. About twenty day lily stems went into the salad. It was beautiful, but ... how to put this delicately? The salad passed through my system at a high velocity, picking up and taking with it most of the water in my body as it went.

But it was a very pretty salad:

Apparently, some daylilies may be hybridized with less-edible species, so one should take care to grow the old fashioned ditch lily kind Hemerocallis fulva http://www.eattheweeds.com/daylily-just-cloning-around-2/

Personally I have not had much success growing them, so have not eaten those in my garden, and I must admit, I don't even know what variety they are!

Another common plant with similar qualifiers is the hosta. Only lately has it gotten around in America that the young shoots of at least one common species of hosta are edible, and popular where this plant is native in Asia. But like the daylily, there are many species and many more cultivated varieties and hybrids, all of which need to be vetted carefully for edibility and digestibility before recommending all Hosta shoots for food with impunity.

I merged your stuff with the following thread. I hope that is okay by you.

I am interested in adding daylily to my forest garden, and was wondering if there are species & varieties selected for improved edibility.

I am also looking for a reputable nursery/permie to source daylily from (I know they grow all over the US, but I'm not 100% sure how to identify).

I have often eaten the flowers of run-of-the-mill orange species daylily that grow like weeds all over.

Not sure if other varieties might be bred for tubers.

Be careful, because they can take over aggressively and start popping up all over.

Everything I've read says to only eat the wild orange variety. Other varieties of day lily have been crossed with species you can't be sure of and thus may not be healthy choices.

I am certain that I saw a post in Joseph Lofthouse’s garden thread about edible day lilies complete with a photo of him nibbling on some petals😘 if I find it, I’ll post the link

I love eating daylily flowers. Haven't had any that I felt were poisonous.

Joseph Lofthouse wrote:I love eating daylily flowers. Haven't had any that I felt were poisonous.

It was my understanding that all Hemerocallis species are edible, but of the ones I've eaten the petals of, I like the wild orange "ditch lily" (Hemerocallis fulva) the best. To me, it tastes kind of like iceberg lettuce. Stella d'Oros and other of the prissier ones taste terrible. I did like classygroundcovers.com's White Triangle and Aztec Gold flavors. No ill effects from eating them in moderation.

just saw this today, a daylily bred for flavor

https://oikostreecrops.com/products/perennial-vegetable-plants/edible-daylily/

the one used for food is the feral wild type also called the tawny daylily.

the others are good tasting too, but they are less prolific. i think one of the main reasons for sticking with the feral types is they are sooooooooo easy and sooooo prolific, they spread vigorously.
plant in any soil, dry wet clay sand, whatever they can hang with anything, produce a lot of food very quickly, thrive on neglect.

the pretty daylilies don't spread very fast, and are much slower growing. i grow some of those too, and occasionally eat them.

but yeah i do have many hundreds/ probably thousands of tawny daylily plants, if anyone is interested in a trade, i am down =)

Found the photo  https://permies.com/t/240/57161/Photos-Joseph-Lofthouse-Garden#728092

The standard orange daylily that spreads quickly is generally the triploid H. fulva 'Europa'.  I love eating it's young flower shoots when the largest flower bud is only about 1/2" long.  I just feel down the scape until I reach the point where it's starts to feel less tender and snap it off there.  Then I steam them as a nice vegetable.  I also eat the new spring leaf shoots if I ever accidentally snap them off.  I've tried the flowers and large buds from it, but they are kind of acrid in the back of my throat so I now avoid them.  I seem to like the flavor of the petals of purple daylily hybrids the most.  I've picked the young scapes from large tetraploid selections thinking "look at the size of those!", but the ones I've tried are not nice flavored like 'Europa'.  I've been meaning to try the petals of H. fulva 'Kwanso' to see if it doesn't have the acridness I get from 'Europa' petals, but haven't gotten around to it yet.
Here are pictures of 'Europa' and 'Kwanso' I found online:

https://garden.org/pics/2014-06-25/Lilydaydreamer/affb87.jpg

C. West wrote:just saw this today, a daylily bred for flavor

https://oikostreecrops.com/products/perennial-vegetable-plants/edible-daylily/

Yow...22 bucks for one daylily? Or is that a bundle? Anyone ordered this?

The Flava Flavor daylily from Oikos is just a small bag with maybe a couple of plants.  I bought some many years ago and they are very fragrant but I have not thought to eat any yet.  I have eaten daylily flowers dried in the sun right after the blooms close and thought they tasted vaguely of mushrooms.  I guess fresh is best.

Jeff Painter wrote:The Flava Flavor daylily from Oikos is just a small bag with maybe a couple of plants.  I bought some many years ago and they are very fragrant but I have not thought to eat any yet.  I have eaten daylily flowers dried in the sun right after the blooms close and thought they tasted vaguely of mushrooms.  I guess fresh is best.

Good to know about the Oikos plants. Did yours multiply much over all this time?

I actually love the taste of mushrooms, so maybe I'll try dehydrating some of the buds this year.

They have multiplied into a clump about 18 inches in diameter in the last 7 or 8 years.  I bought them mainly because of the fragrance and in hopes that having another variety in the garden would result in cross pollination.  Years later I still have not seen any seed pods develop on any daylilies so I will just have to learn how to pollinate by hand.

J Webb wrote:I am interested in adding daylily to my forest garden, and was wondering if there are species & varieties selected for improved edibility.

I am also looking for a reputable nursery/permie to source daylily from (I know they grow all over the US, but I'm not 100% sure how to identify).

I use lily buds in cooking, I have never raised them myself, I buy dried at my local Asian Food Market. I use them mostly to flavor vegetable stock for soups and then I eat them in the soup. Your post made me curious about growing them and I did some research for myself, I want to share it with you and others who may be interested, see below.

All daylilies are edible and all parts of daylilies  (Hernerocallis spp., Hemerocallidaceae) are edible. I hope you know daylilies are not related to the true lily which is extremely poisonous.

Here are several links you may find helpful.
https://pubag.nal.usda.gov/download/39856/PDF  
http://www.michaelandjudystouffer.com/judy/organic/daylilies.htm
https://www.motherearthnews.com/organic-gardening/how-to-sustainably-harvest-daylilies-zbcz1307
https://www.pbs.org/food/kitchen-vignettes/daylily-fritters-edible-flowers/

I would not recommend day lilies as a perennial vegetable, due to the high chances of ingesting one that can make you very sick. Toxic alkaloids are often used in cultivation, and it's just too risky a thing to chance, in my opinion. I've covered this in detail here: https://www.catintheflock.com/2020/07/why-you-should-ditch-the-daylilies.html

Found one company selling 3 varieties of daylily for food. Other cites seem to highlight the food noteworthy are orange or yellow in color (but more for eating the flowers than the tubers. https://daylilygarden.com/garden-plants/daylilies/flowers/food-daylily.html

This podcast is a neat interview of a daylily breeder with quite a bit of talk about culinary uses.

This is our first year growing daylilies, I got them from another lady at my church who had too many.  We've been enjoying the flowers in stir fries and sauteys, and I intend to try out the tubers, now that they're happily established in a huge pot, we planted them last Aug. when they weren't much of anything.  I didn't try the tubers last year since they were new and getting situated, but we will try them this time, I hear the best time for the tubers is Oct.?

Additionally we will be making use of the new growth shutes now that I know how prolific they are and that they'll keep growing if I harvest some.  Once they're bigger I think they're too tough, nibbled on some too late in spring haha.

I'm dealing with our changing climate in England: milder, wetter winters, but still with significant frost as late as mid-May, coupled with hotter, dryer summers, with days in the high 20s C as early as late April this year.

Daylilies are one of the possible perennial vegetables I'd like to try, if we can find a known tasty variety to grow.

(As we live with cats, knowing these aren't true lilies - which are pretty toxic to cats, - is a useful start).

Casie Becker,
I have merged your topic into this topic. I hope that helps.

The hot dry summers are definitely getting harder to plan around in the UK. Daylilies handle that kind of variability better than most perennial veg though. The wild orange type seems the most practical for eating too, which is handy since they're basically indestructible compared to the fancier cultivars.

Joao Winckler wrote:The hot dry summers are definitely getting harder to plan around in the UK.

Indeed.

Joao Winckler wrote: Daylilies handle that kind of variability better than most perennial veg though. The wild orange type seems the most practical for eating too, which is handy since they're basically indestructible compared to the fancier cultivars.

Interesting!

ETA: re-reading the thread, these Hemerocallis fulva.  

(There seems to be considerable confusion about whether daylilies are toxic to cats & dogs, possibly due to misidentification since true lilies, Lilium spp, definitely are toxic to cats).