Planting Bearded Iris
September 19, 2007
During the first week of September I finally got around to planting my bearded iris rhizomes that were given to me when I helped a friend dig up her iris bed.
Here are the BJ NOIDs, irises that my friend received from a woman named BJ whose irises have lost their ID names:
Here are the Australian NOIDs:
I had soaked the BJ and Aussie NOIDs for half an hour in a bleach solution of 1 part bleach and 9 parts water to prevent rot and infestation from iris borers.
And here are a few named varieties I was given: an Oddbod, a Dorothy Davenport, a Rockstar and three Grandma’s Hat. You can see the names written on one of the fans of the rhizome. I didn’t give these ones a bleach bath as I had received them just before planting.
I decided to cut back some of the leaf fan so that the weight of the leaves wouldn’t cause the newly-planted iris to fall over in the wind. Here is one iris that I started with:
I trimmed off the dead parts of the fan using scissors or my fingers when it was quite dry:
Then I made two snips with my scissors to create a pointy arrow, leaving approximately 3″ – 4″ left of the fan.
I decided that I wanted a clump of iris at different points in my flower bed. I picked spots where I knew the iris would get at least 6 hours of sunlight a day. Once I had my spots picked out I started to plant the rhizomes.
First I brushed away a small area of soil, approximately 12″ x 12″, to create a level surface 2″ into the soil. I gathered soil under the palm of my hand and created a small raised area by cupping my hand ontop of the soil surface:
I placed the rhizome ontop of the raised soil and tried to evenly spread the roots out around the circle. Spreading the roots helps the rhizome to anchor itself into the soil.
Holding the top of the fan I pulled back the soil over the roots to cover them, making sure that the top of the rhizome was level with or only slightly below the soil surface. If you plant them too deep they may rot or not flower next year.
Then I pressed down on the soil around the rhizome to make sure that the roots made good contact with the soil and also to help secure the iris into the ground.
I planted the irises into three-rhizome clumps that were spaced approximately 6″ away from each other. I’m not sure but I think they may have been too close to each other. I also cut a mini blind and labeled each three-iris clump.
Then I watered them every day for a week and promptly forgot about them. Squirrels decided to see how the BJ NOIDs tasted and dug a few of them up twice, leaving the irises all exposed and showing their roots in the morning. I tried to replant some of them but ended up losing two rhizomes to those varmints. The next day I sprayed the irises with my noxious-smelling Salmon Fertilizer and that seems to have done it. My irises are now unmolested and sitting pretty in my flower beds.
Gifting Orange Ditch Lilies
September 17, 2007
I decided to get rid of the orange ditch lilies in my flower beds a couple of weekends ago. I posted on Plantcycle and Freecycle that I was re-arranging my flower beds and would have 3-4 large clumps of this spreading lily to offer to anyone who wanted to come and pick them up. I had a few replies and chose the person who lived the closest (and who would more than likely show up) so that I could supervise their dig.
The woman I gifted them to came with her son who did most of the digging.
Here’s how it all looked in the back of her car:
I’m really glad they are gone – some had started to spread on the lawn. Of course I’ll probably be digging out more as time goes on as these types of day lilies are so persistent and hard to get rid of. At least the bulk of them are gone and I can replace them with something more polite and docile.
The Large Flower Bed at Dundonald Park
September 11, 2007
I found out about an offering of flowers from Plantcycle, a website that is similar to Freecycle, except it is for plants. The offer was for echinacea, heliopsis, lily of the valley, monarda, iris, evening primrose, silver-leaf sage, some mystery flowers and lots of day lilies. The email was sent out to 18 people to meet at a store in Ottawa on Sunday at 11 AM – the email assured everyone there would be LOTS of flowers. So I packed up some plastic bags and my shovel and went.
The location turned out to be the large flower bed at Dundonald Park at 516 Somerset Street.
I found out the City of Ottawa no longer plants flowers in its city parks, a reduction in service that had been in place since 2004 and resulting in a yearly city-wide savings of $110,000. The Friends of Dundonald Park adopted the park and created the large flower bed, tending to it over the years. Recently, decisions were made to apply for a grant from the City of Ottawa to convert the flower bed to trees and shrubs which meant the flowers had to go. Even though they were sad to see their beloved flowers removed, they were happy that the Plantcyclers were going to give them a good home.
It took me an hour to dig, bag and load these flowers into my car:
I took home some echinacea, lily of the valley, two different types of hosta, some day lilies, a couple of gladiolas and a few mystery bulbs. I’ve potted them up in recycling bins and old pots until I figure out where I want to put them.
It was nice to meet more fellow Plantcyclers. As someone there said, it was like Christmas in September!
Expanding the Flower Beds
August 21, 2007
I managed to expand one of my flower beds by 4 feet over a period of three days this weekend, using the sheet mulching technique I mentioned earlier.
DAY 1 – ROCK REMOVAL
We pretty much took a whole day just to remove the existing rock wall, piling them up in the middle of the backyard. Some of these rocks were buried quite deep into the soil, perhaps as a form of weed barrier. This was all that was done on Day 1 – it was hard work.
DAY 2 – PREPARATION & EXECUTION
I started out the day removing packing tape from all the boxes I scrounged from my work. I had been stressing over where I was going to find enough newspapers in time for the start of this project that I completely forgot about the new shipment of computers we had received. This part was slow, fiddly and awkward.
Before I could even start envisioning my new beds, I had to move the arbour and flagstones and clear them out of the way. The arbour was only dug into the ground about a foot so it was really easy to get it out. Moving it as one whole structure was really difficult. I found a lot of ants under the flagstones.
This is about half the pile of flagstones that came out of the pathway. Some of them were really heavy.
We repositioned the arbour so that it was aligned to the house, roughly in the middle of the house and the fence. We kept walking back and forth with this thing, trying to get the right “feeling” of where it should be. Things went a lot quicker when I was told that it didn’t have to be perfect.
I hadn’t fully committed to any design for the new bed, I just knew that I wanted it to be wider so that I would have room to play around with height and depth. I brought out a long extension cord and played around with an evenly-wavy and oddly-wavy pathway. Nothing really looked right and after a while I decided on a straight line on the right and a curved line on the left side. I brought out the whipper snipper and cut the grass as low as I could get it. I then watered it heavily, making about two or three passes to get it good and soaked. We started laying down a thin layer of used coffee grinds.
That layer got watered and then it was time to lay down the cardboard.
I had a stash of newspapers that I used to fill out the sides and underneath where the cardboard had slits. After we laid down the cardboard, we dug in some edging. I took some landscaping fabric, cut it in half length-wise and used it to cram down into the edging that we had made. I had read that you could cut up plastic rug covers but I decided to use the landscaping fabric.
About halfway through the day I realized that I should get some black earth and peat moss as the leaf compost was too fine a particulate and needed some more body to help it retain moisture. I picked up 12 bags of black earth and one large bag of peat moss for $37.80 CDN.
The backyard looked terrible.
I watered the cardboard and started to spread the leaf compost. The paper leaf and yard waste bags that I had used to transport the compost from the facility started to fall apart. We ended up with a lot of compost on the garage floor. The beds were coming along nicely.
Next came the rocks and I folded the landscaping fabric onto the compost and laid the rocks on top. Hopefully this will reduce the amount of pesky grass and weeds that try to grow around it.
This was the end of Day 2. I had worked pretty steadily from 8:30 AM to 4:30 PM. It was looking good.
DAY 3 – FINISHING UP
The next day, after dragging myself out of bed, I started dumping the bags of black earth at regular intervals. There were big chunks that I had to break up.
After I spread that on top, I dumped shovelfuls of peat moss. This stuff was really fine and dusty.
I spread the peat most evenly and started to work the layers together with a garden rake, trying to fold the layers into each other to make a good mix. It was hard not to pull up the cardboard underneath so this part had to go slow.
We lined up the rest of the rocks along the edge and then stood back and looked at all our hard work. The beds are now 5.5 ft wide along the length of the side fence and also extend about five feet on the back fence. Here is the before shot:
And here is the after:
I now get to work on the beds beside the edge of the deck, along the side of the house and at the front of the house. I’m out of cardboard, used coffee grinds, peat moss and black earth and only have 3 bags left of leaf compost. The total cost for this project was $61.80 and countless hours of manual labour prior and during the project.
Digging Up An Iris Bed
August 3, 2007
I helped out my garden buddy, Berni from La Vie En Rose Gardens, last weekend by digging up one of her bearded iris beds to transfer them to Ottawa. It had been sadly neglected by the garden host and there were many weeds, iris borers and soft rot. I jumped at the chance of helping her out so that I could learn from an expert about these beautiful flowers as well as receiving a generous amount of new rhizomes.
We started out the day at 8 AM. I brought my long-handled shovel and a short spade, finding out later that a garden fork would have been better as it does less damage to the rhizomes and roots. We were dismayed at what greeted us:
Weeds! Four-foot high weeds! Before we could even start the project we had to pull all these weeds so that we wouldn’t trample any precious plants underfoot. Here’s a close-up of what we were dealing with:
You can see the pointy sheaths of the bearded irises nestled in amongst the weeds. Bearded irises like good air circulation and can get smothered under weeds which leads to fungus and rot. We started weeding. This (bottom right) was just one of the many piles of weeds we made that day:
You can see the bearded irises now, some with extensive leaf damage due to the excessive weeds. All were labelled, some with pretty funky names like Klingon Princess and Sargent Preston.
There were some labels that didn’t have growth behind it where the bearded iris had died. R.I.P. Dotted Doll and Grandma’s Hat. After a couple of hours of intense weeding we started lifting the clumps of irises. Each iris has a main rhizome that creates lateral buds that grow into new shoots. One clump of iris will have one rhizome and as many as 15 – 20 new shoots. Once you separate the shoots, each new shoot has the potential to create a new main rhizome from which it will create more new shoots. Given the right conditions, iris can be very prolific.
Unfortunately bearded iris are prone to the iris borer, a nastly little bug that can cause extensive damage. Adult moths lay eggs in the iris bed in August/September of the previous year. In April/May, larvae tunnel into the leaves and eat their way down towards the soil. By mid-July they enter the rhizome and cause bacterial soft rot. Here’s a shot of the larvae:
Then they move from the rhizome into the soil where they pupate and hatch into adult moths, laying their eggs in the iris bed to start the process over again. We found a few of these larvae in the bed and, to fight against this infestation, all the rhizomes were to be soaked in a solution of 1 part bleach and 9 parts water.
We kept working, falling into a rhythym of setting the fork beside a clump, stepping down, angling the fork to lift up the clump, pulling up the clump, shaking the soil off, grabbing the tag and place it on the grass for processing. Set, step, angle, pull, shake, tag and place. There was a lot of clumps. You can kind of see the piles of iris in a row on the grass (also weedy!)
There were three other volunteers and two of them were busy processing all the lifted clumps of iris. They grabbed a clump, checked the list to see if it had been sold, not sold or donated. Using scissors they clipped leaves of the clump down to 4″ – 6″ high and shortened the roots to a fist-width. The stock number was written on a plastic bag with a Sharpie and the tidied-up clump was bagged and piled.
Things were going along smoothly with three people digging and two people bagging until the downpour. Hastily setting up a canopy we all stood underneath and weighed our options. We decided to keep going and, being a bit of a wuss, I grabbed my raincoat. I was soaked and covered in sweat-mingled mud. Of course, it wasn’t too long before we decided to break for lunch.
I was a bit self-concious sitting in the restaurant, the backs of my legs, feet and flip flops covered in mud, however, once the food came I didn’t care. I was starving. Getting up to head out, our wooden seats were stained gray by our wet butts! Thankfully it stopped raining. Back at the iris bed things were looking better as almost all the irises had been lifted:
Once lifted, all five of us were working on processing the irises by trimming the clumps, bagging and marking them. We loaded them all up in the van at 4 PM:
Looking back, the iris bed was finally empty.
It took five people and 26 combined hours to dig up this iris bed. It was a huge undertaking and we were rewarded with our own irises to take home. I took a few clumps and went home and had a two-hour nap.
When I had started the day I was tentative and timid about lifting these beautiful flowers. After 8 hours of working in the humidity, rain and mud I feel very confident about digging up and dividing irises.
