I have just dug up the entire bed of iris in the front ( top of driveway) garden, We finally got rain-so i knew I could dig.let it get dry a few more days-murder. clay doesn't give.
To my surprise, the earth turned up easily-and was brown, not red. Loam! incredible! I haven;t cleaned that bed our properly since the electric company killed off trees and damaged the Iris, fortunately the daffs and daylilies weren't up at that time of year.I have over the last seven years occasionally weeded, put some straw mulch down from time to time, and threw fertilizer at the daffs occasionally. that;s it. Bruce plowed the fan shape and we did put in about 10 bags of topsoil when we first planted.that was just a nod-barely covered the surface.
Anyway, there are so MANY iris I don;t need to replant, the survivors should fill in nicely.( those too close to other plants i left alone; and no matter how you dig, bulbs/rhizomes actually, always seem to leave pieces behind)
so what I also found was..the iris, with the natural weed mulch and the garden building it's soil nicely-were buried too deep! the rule for iris is-backs to the sun. Literally. you don;t even want the whole bulb covered.
both my back seats in the van are covered with iris bulbs up to about waist high. Yes, I will have hundreds to give away-and 2 more beds to go. One can just be lifted with the broadfork I think, so they sit at a higher level.. all the iris will then be separated, and leaves on each fan cut back in an inverted V to save on water loss and encourage new fans (where your flowers will be next spring) the plants are so clean- the dirt still on them so rich, I'll definitely put everything not usable in the compost. not one plant shows signs of iris borer! (holes, )
natural methods work!/ this was just sort of by accident..but it just makes me more determined to invade as little as possible-no plowing, use deep mulches, and stand back and watch the show!
After we made the flower bed it started to rain, we literally dumped the iris on the ground, spread them around and dumped mulch on them, the next year they came up and flowered just fine. Not so good the year Toby spent alot of time in that corner barking at the world. He even managed to walk THROUGH the fencing I put around the iris, so I had to put a layer of chicken wire behind the fencing. The following years they flowered just fine.
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