Good morning, and ain't it fucking lovely? Welcome to Saturday Morning Garden Blogging.
Denver, at last, will have dry weather for a weekend — the first time in at least a month.
Last weekend was a literal washout and then some: it rained every day from May 21 to May 26, with the heaviest rain on Memorial Day. It's hard to believe that statistically we're still under the May average for precipitation this year.
But the coming week is forecast to be perfect, with highs in the 70s and 80s with only a chance of thunderstorms in the afternoon, something we are very used to — and which cools the nighttime temperatures to the 50s so we don't get day-over-day heat build up.
When the clouds broke on Wednesday I caught the ladybug factory hard at work on a peony bud.
When I grabbed the camera to get the picture of the ladybugs, I also managed to catch the sun slanting through the breaking clouds into the bowl of an oriental poppy. It was one of those rare occasions that, when I downloaded the pictures and was clicking through them, I just stopped and thought "holy shit, that's good". Which was a good thing, because I am fucking pissed that the rains destroyed the two blooms on the tree peony as they opened. One day I had two huge, gorgeous buds on the brink of opening, and a couple of days later it looked like the plant had two blobs of wet, pink toilet tissue hanging on it. Grrrrr.
Between the bindweed and the rain I'm really, really behind on the yard work. I mean, the veggies are planted, but I haven't started putting the planters together and I've weeds popping up everywhere. The lawn needs mowed again, I haven't gotten the last batch of grass clippings mixed into the compost bin, and I still need to hack back the sweet autumn clematis and climbing rose, and get them lashed to the trellis.
Oh, and I'm preparing to move a giant stepping stone, which entails moving everything out of the way first. The stone is in the small east-side bed of our front yard adjacent to the neighbor's yard. During the winter when there are no masses of blossoms and vegetation the postal carriers merrily ignore the stepping stone three steps closer the street and tromp through the flower bed.
One of the things that was where the stone is to be moved is a mass planting of over-crowded iris. So even though it's a about a month early side to be dividing iris, I'm doing it anyway. The rhizomes have barely started putting out new roots; the presence of new roots is one of the ways to tell which rhizomes to keep and which ones to trash. If I waited a month, more of the rhizomes would be showing root buds at the base. But, it's not like I'm not going to have enough of that variety fur gawd's sake; the things are massively overcrowded.
This particular variety of iris is what was here when we moved in: a straight line across the middle of the front yard which, apparently, hadn't been divided in at least decade. The first time we divided them we had garbage bags full of vigorous rhizomes. This time I'll likely only have a couple of bushels.
So here's your iris-dividing primer, for varieties of which you have too many: if you have one, use a spading fork and insert it at the edge of the bed, and use it to lift the mass of rhizomes (and if you don't have one, get one; the spading fork is one of my most useful of gardening tools). A mass of connected rhizomes likely will lift out largely intact. If the clump bloomed that year, use a sharp knife to separate those rhizomes which are plump and showing new root buds at their base, and use a scissors to cut the fan of leaves back to the point where they just start leaving space between the leaves and set aside in a shady spot until you can either re-plant them or give them away — those rhizomes are most likely to bloom next year. As soon as practical, re-plant the rhizomes 6" to 12" apart, spreading the roots into a hole, but leaving the backs of the rhizomes exposed. Throw away any rhizomes that are showing soft spots, or that bloomed this year.
Part of my problem this year, though, is that I know I have a different variety of iris in that bed which were too crowded to bloom this year — so I don't know for sure which rhizomes they are, but as I don't have very many of that variety and I'm very fond of them, I want to make sure that I retain any rhizome which may be of that variety. In this situation, where I want to encourage multiplication of variety rather than thin them out, I proceed a little differently. I keep all the rhizomes that have leaves and have no soft spots, whether or not they will bloom next year. I have a stack of a dozen or two rhizomes that I'm pretty sure include the desired variety. I'm going to use the new planter boxes as an "iris nursery" — there will be a lot of room out there for the next couple-three years until the new perennials reach full size, time enough for these iris to come to bloom and be identified.
As I was prying up the last batch of iris from the bed on Thursday, the UPS man (knees showing!) arrived with my order of replacement plants from High Country Gardens (if you'll recall I had to delay planting the original order and several of the plants didn't make it through the delay). My thought was that, as it was late in the day and I was about to knock off anyway, I would unpack the plants, and put them in the ground the following evening.
That was until Mommy's Little Helper Caligula showed up to assist. Although he's now about a year old, Caligula is still a toddler in his need to bite... everything... including taste-testing the new plants.
Sigh.... I ended up getting digging tools out again and quickly popping the plants into the ground, rather than finishing off the division of the last iris clump.
That's what's happening here; what's going in your gardens?