If it's in a fully enclosed porch, that helps. If it's warmer in there during the day, that helps. But it can also help if you get yourself some bubble wrap and wrap the pot a few times. It's kind of the easiest and fastest ways to get a little extra insulation on a pot in the porch if you can't do more serious stuff. If the pot is small enough to fit in a cooler, that works well too- think of the styrofoam caps folks sometimes use on rose bushes to overwinter. If you get box food delivery service that has insulation in the box, that insulation works well too. Yes, you should water. But not a lot. You don't want the dirt to go bone dry, but you don't want it wet either. The plants are dormant and so don't really need water themselves, but the dirt still should be a bit moist. And pots seem to want to stay damp longer when it's cold out so you might not need to water much at all depending.

Sounds like you had lots and lots of the Asian ladybug that was around in mass numbers a few years ago in New England, several years ago as my 28 year old daughter was still in school then. If I remember the story correctly, they where imported to this country to help out with insect control and it was believed that they didn't survive. It was found that they had and in mass numbers and they, more than the ladybugs that were here all along, have an attraction to light colored exterior homes, especially white, as well as white walls and in the fall they would cover both inside and outside of light colored homes in mass droves, looking for entryways into the home for the winter. My home is white exterior and the walls of my daughters room where white at the time and her bedroom was on a west facing side of the house. All disaster for her and her room. Her room was infested with the beetles and I was vacuuming them up in her room, the walls, the floors the furniture, even in her bed for about 3 weeks and then they where gone. Gone, that is, until the spring. Then these wonderful asian ladybugs reappeared all over the inside of her room as if I had never vacuumed them up. they where coming out of any and all crevices that they had gone into for the winter and we had to keep her bedroom windows open and the screens up all day, every day for about a week. Since that year, and it seems to me that she was in middle school then, we have not had a problem like that repeat itself. We just would get the occasional ladybug in the house. That is as long as I didn't need them to eat the aphids. The years that I did, well none where to be seen. A was talking with a friend of ours that is a farmer and he reminded me of one method to try and keep some ladybugs around over the winter for next year. Get some corn stalks, if you don't grow corn, or use your own if you do. Let them dry out, and then place them on top of your garden beds in the fall. You only need a couple of stalks per bed and you can cut them down to fit the bed if need be. Leave them there all winter and spring until you are ready to clean up the beds. Apparently ladybugs love to stay under and around the corn stalks for the winter and come spring, are very content that you provided them a place to winter over and will stay in your beds. That's my plan for the fall. Corn stalks in the beds for the winter. If lucky ladybugs in the spring and I won't have to buy them. Fran

Sounds like a textbook case of damping off. What arrangements have you made for ventilation? Do you keep the glass on after the seeds have germinated? You do need ventilation and you should remove the glass after a good number - not necessarilly all - of the seeds have germinated, long, long before they get to be 3" tall. The humidity should not be too high and you should not keep the soil or seedlings too warm - both will encourage growth of the fungus responsible for "damping off disease." The spores are pretty much ubiquitous so don't bother thinking about killing them all off, you just want to discourage too active growth of them. So... get rid of the potting soil you've been using so far. Clean out the containers with bleach solution (they do have drainage holes, BTW, right?) and start again, with a fan not too far off but not blowing right on the seedlings, remove the glass shortly after they start to germinate, don't keep the soil any warmer than about 70F unless you're starting tropical seedlings and back it off a bit even from that once they've germinated and you'll probably find you get dramatically better results.

Kate - I think I've had everything that can plague daylilies in the last year -except earwigs. You laid out the main list of plagues in your comment. But I'll add two more: deer and burrowing varmints. I was out spraying deer repellant by the light of the moon last night. And I'm trying to repair damage in my red bed by an unidentified burrowing animal that has dug tunnels straight through the middles of some of my biggest clumps and has also caused a cave-in. I actually saw a groundhog running in the neighbor's ditch two days ago. I guess this could be the culprit. I live in the city, so why am I getting all this wildlife? Debra