Welcome Friday!  This week was iris division and planting week, but first a few blooms.

My beautiful heirloom lily.  When it finally blooms, it has a long bloom time.

Zinnia.

There are a bunch that haven’t opened up yet and all were seeded at the same time. Go figure. This one is Giant Salmon Rose. Not really giant, but remembering from last year these could grow a lot later.

Now for some irises. Unlike most planting times of spring or fall, irises get done in mid August or so – about 8 weeks after they have finished blooming.  I had ordered a few rhizomes early in the spring (on sale, of course LOL) and they arrived this week at planting time. How convenient!

I’m trying a reblooming iris for the first time. It’s name is Immortality , which brings of visions of vampires for some reason.  It’s a pure white flower.  That is going in the front bed.

In the back, I am moving one of the irises, Night Ruler (black), because it didn’t bloom this year and the clump isn’t big enough for size to be the reason it didn’t bloom. I think it just didn’t get enough sun.

You can see it leaning into the direction of the sun here and kind of being crowded by surrounding plants.

I know some gardeners like to trim  down the iris fans each season, but IMHO it’s not necessary and stresses out the plant for no reason. However, when digging them up I will cut them so they aren’t trying to pump food into leaves when they need to be putting down roots.

I just put a shovel under the clump and levered up. Then I basically just pulled up the rhizome clump. Unless they are really overgrown, irises come up pretty easily.  The dirt pretty much falls off the root as well. It really is one of the easiest plants to move around.

Two years ago I planted one rhizome – the big middle piece – and now I have three.

Just simply cut or break the rhizome off the mother bulb. You can toss the mother bulb as it will likely never bloom again.

Replanted the three rhizomes in new spots and I put two of the newly arrived rhizomes along with them. I got Edgefield Glow, which is orange, and Wild Irish Rose, which is a rosy orchid color. Should be fun!

In the front, it was certainly time to divide these irises!

These ones are super prolific, much more so than my larger bearded iris.  The batik iris is to the left of the picture and you can see how different it looks. When we moved here 3 years ago, I cut off a hunk of these rhizomes and divided them into 4 plants. Look at them today.

This was from one rhizome! Multiply that by 4.

 

All nicely planted. It’s a little bare now, but these will start showing growth pretty quickly – I hope.

After replanting what I wanted – I am left with over 40 rhizomes!  40!  That’s after tossing any that had bloomed already.  Message me if you want some. It’s this iris:

Have a great weekend!