PLANTING BEARDED IRIS into NEW BEDS! // Transplanting Bearded Iris Rhizomes // Backyard Flower Farm

Hello everyone, welcome back to the garden. I'm gonna quickly show you some of this stuff I'm clearing out the garden growing space for fall. Lots of these pumpkins. These are the Whatever these are called. I'll write it on the screen. I always say it wrong So I'm not even gonna try to go there Lots of early pumpkins this year really impressed by that as well as several moon and stars Watermelons, which were easily 30 to 40 pounds apiece, which I was under the impression that those were much smaller but Apparently not because I've been swimming in these things literally can't keep up, but I wanted to show you the process of Kind of plowing up my beds and getting ready for the bearded irises And so many people are interested in that since this bed has never been a bed before this grassy area Has never been a bed before what I did is I just kind of gave it a really really close Some mow with my lawnmower and I got my trusty little tiny tiller out this little tiller is on his last leg Unfortunately and in an ideal world, I would have a no-till garden But of course, I mean it takes time to start growing stuff from you know, just the beginning So I'm doing my best to till up these beds with this little cultivator, but it's It's almost done. I don't know I need to buy a tractor What I did was they're prepared a bed this one ended up being about 20 feet by 4 feet wide ended up doing Probably 4 to 5 plants across each which are a little bit tightly packed I am planting from new stock that I received this year I ordered this from the Facebook group wholesale for small cell growers If you were familiar with that one, I'm sure a lot of you are here is what our bearded irises Look like when ordering that way and you can see they are just little dried up a little looking nothing So you're just like are we sure those are gonna grow rest assured these will grow I grew the same things last year and you'll see what they look like now Since I had moved to gardens, I had put the ones I ordered last year into large three gallon pots I just put three irises for three Well three irises per one three gallon pot And as you can see they did really well I am entirely surprised on how robust and hardy these bearded irises are I always thought they were like a delicate flower or plant and apparently not To prepare these for transplant what I first wanted to do was go ahead and trim all this foliage back So what I did is I took a clean pair of snips and just cut that foliage back to create kind of a fan shape As I did that I made sure to you know Leave the leaves kind of slanted so that any excess water would drain from them And I really just want to make sure I'm not encouraging rot or development of disease I know there are mixed reviews on whether or not you even have to cut back the fan leaves of bearded irises Some people say definitely do it others people, you know, you don't really have to unless they are You know showing noticeable signs of disease Main reason I'm doing it here this year is that I am transplanting them out of these pots They've been growing in these pots past summer and winter and again this summer You can see there's some kind of weeds that have worked their way in there as well. So I wanted to definitely Cut these back to make them more manageable here in the yard Maybe in the future I will experiment with leaving the fans intact or the you know The blades intact to see how that works or whether or not One way grows better than the other As you can see once I've dumped out these potted plants onto the ground I was amazed by the root development. I was absolutely amazed by the size for one and development of roots That had occurred over the course of the season absolutely insane like I'm Some of these were so intertwined I had trouble just you know dividing them at all and some of them had even produced new Offshoots where I did need to divide the plant divide the fan I'm not showing you that right now just because the sole focus of this video was to show You know transplanting of the bearded irises into the new bed, which you'll see here in a second I didn't even do a very good job of because unfortunately my file of me planting them actually into the bed became corrupted But you know, I'm learning. I'm not a tech savvy person So hopefully hopefully all will be well by next year and I'll be able to give a more detailed You know video better video of this in the future But once I did get all those separated you can see I had a lot of extra dirt of potting soil And I ended up just working that potting soil into the bed itself in general when you plant bearded irises most people I think suggest making a kind of a mound of soil and Then placing it on top and then letting the roots kind of splay out around the plant and you can see how the root The root shape and structure really lends itself to that. So I think that was very helpful I'm sure you could probably trim back these roots if you really wanted to but like I said I had plenty of room in this bed So it wasn't a big deal to me So I did not do that as I planted them I wanted to make sure to leave just a little bit of that rhizome, you know exposed as far as I've always rather understood I've been told that's very important in the flowering process encouraging these plants to flower. So that's what I made sure to do Overall I probably planted these a lot closer than most people would have the spacing is about six inches if I had to guess and That's just it's not a big deal to me. I think in the future. I might even move this bed so I will be of course digging them up and Resituating them and you know, probably multiplying them dividing them whatever you want to call it To get more plants in the future and who knows I might even kind of dip my toes into the world of hybridizing my own Bearded irises, which I've seen online that is really fun You know a lot of cool, you know color combinations and really beautiful specimens that way that's really about it for this video I am a total beginner at bearded iris. So if you have no more experience than me, please Leave it down in the comments below. I always love when people are able to just articulate little details that maybe get over Overlooked or you might not know that help and make a tremendous difference I'm always thankful for that. And of course, I'm thankful so much for you for watching It really means a lot to me because without you it didn't like it genuinely would not be possible So thank you for helping me start this little garden, and I hope you're having a great day Hope the weather is really beautiful wherever you are. You totally deserve it. Thank you so much. Bye