Irises are a beautiful and elegant perennial flower that can bring a lot of beauty to your garden. In Minnesota, it's important to know when to divide your potted iris plants in order to keep them healthy and blooming. Usually, you can tell that the iris is ready to divide when a group seems overgrown with weeds, and the rhizomes begin to grow one inside the other and emerge from the ground. It's also possible that they won't produce as many flowers.
We recommend dividing your irises after about 3 or 4 years, as they get too full. The iris needs space to grow new plants.If they are too crowded, they won't be able to divide and flowering will suffer or stop. Overcrowding also promotes disease problems due to lack of air circulation. The best time to divide lilies is 6 to 8 weeks after the flowering season, usually in July or August.
The clumps can be diluted by removing the centers of the clusters, leaving the newer shoots in the ground, or digging the entire group and saving the new rhizomes and discarding the old “mother plants” or any rhizome that is not healthy or soft.It's a good idea to keep all plants carefully labeled when removing all the mass. You can use a waterproof pen to write the name on the leaf of the plant. After digging the lilies, divide them by cutting off the newer rhizomes with connected fans. When the clusters of irises get too dense, it's time to divide.With a garden fork, dig deep under the dough and dig in.
Since you can't get a second flower by cutting off the flower of a wilted iris (except for cultivars that bloom again), the only way to extend the flowering season is to plant more than one cultivar. If you're ready to bring the elegant perennial beauty of lilies to your garden, you can order many types of iris flowers online.The Nola Iris Garden says: “Irises should be fertilized in early spring, about 6 to 8 weeks before flowering and again after the flowers have disappeared. The University of Minnesota Extension provides detailed instructions on how to identify iris borers when inspecting your plants in spring and summer. At your local garden store, you'll likely find some iris bulbs or rhizomes for sale, depending on the season.We didn't do anything to amend the soil, we simply dug a trench with the garden tractor, put the iris in the trench and kicked and pushed the soil over the iris.
To a certain extent, you can prevent future problems with iris borers by properly trimming and cleaning your iris plants in the fall.Nola's Iris Garden says: “During periods of drought (longer than three or four weeks), you'll have to water them deeply every 3 or 4 weeks, depending on the temperature. The rhizome-type iris produces larger flowers and includes bearded and beardless flowers, while the bulb-type iris produces smaller flowers and is often used in rock gardens or in the front row of borders to provide color early in the year. Gardeners can avoid many problems by providing good drainage to prevent the iris from getting wet with their feet.We didn't plant the irises for more than three months and weren't sure if they were still alive when a family member volunteered to plant rhizomes of irises for us.