Permaculture: Food From Sustainable Landscapes

So, I promised myself that I was going to focus on useful plants in my garden, rather than wandering off into pure ornamentals, but I kind of fell in love with daylilies over the summer, and now I'm a bit obsessed. Did you know there are over 60,000 registered cultivars? And they're practically unkillable! And they're ridiculously easy to hybridize at home! And they're gorgeous!

So, um, yeah, a bit obsessed. But I'm rationalizing that it's okay to massively expand my daylily collection because they *are* technically edible. In fact, I've eaten the dried flower buds of one of the Chinese varieties, and so have you, probably, if you've ever gotten hot-and-sour soup at a reasonably authentic restaurant.

But I don't know if it's only a few specific varieties that are tasty enough to eat on a regular basis, or if they're all fairly palatable, and I don't know anyone who's tried harvesting them at home. Obviously, I'm not going to spend $100 a plant for the latest fancy varieties and then serve them for dinner. Because (a) I'm not spending that much on a plant unless it grows pure gold apples or something, and (b) why eat the pretty? But, you know, if civilization collapses or something, I'd like to know if I have something truly useful on my hands or not.