For some reason I did not get e-mails from either of you that posted above and my member page is set up to get e-mails so not sure what is going on. Try e-mailing me directly from the e-mail on my member page instead of using the form. Deb

the heck with the designers ... they are a bunch of foo foo moe-rons anyway ... WHATEVER.. AND WHERE EVER PLEASES YOU.. is the ONLY rule in my garden ... and if it doesnt work out.. move it later ... some iris have very specific cultural requirements which make them hard to place in a diverse garden ... but i forget which ... its the swamp ones.. japanese i think .. but they are not the bearded ones ... so it probably doenst matter to you.. which makes me wonder why i am still typing and not just deleting this near worthless post.. lol ... but i cant stop.. too much cooooffffeeeeee what ever pleases your eye.. should be the only rule for your garden.. and that does bear repeating.. or is it bare.. which i doubt.. boy.. talk about stream of consciousness ... lol good luck ken ps: i have them all over the conifer beds .... i suppose the designers would probably cringe at that too ....

Signet, remember you are also a zone 6 which means that you get frost a lot later than we do in zone 2 or 3. So, being that replanting the iris needs to be with enough time to get the iris re-established before freeze up here in zone 2 - 3, that means that replanting should be done no later than the end of August. A friend of mine has hundreds and hundreds of iris here in the Brandon area and that is the advice that she gives. There is a problem though when buying irises in the fall here on the prairies because the Ontario and BC growers will not send out the irises to the nurseries and box stores until about the middle of September and then it is usually only the tall German irises and the occasional SDB that are sent. They do not ideally have time to get established before our freezeups. So, now, when buying some of these, I have grown them over in the house for the winter and planted them out into the garden in the spring. Personally, so far, I have never had a problem here with irises heaving out of the ground. I rather think that I would be unable to stomp them back into the ground because once my ground is frozen, it is frozen. A friend of mine lives in Dartmouth and she does have perennials heave out of the ground in the winter. I know that she is rather frustrated sometimes when it happens. Do you feel the same way Signet? I have had problems with deer coming and pulling/nibbling on the iris just before freezeup and thus leaving the iris on the top of the soil for the winter, but that is a different story. Brenda

I have heavy clay here, after moving from very well draining, but non wetting soil. My clay holds water very well, and also sits above the septic drainage bed. I rarely ever water the irises. The first year I had huge problems with rot, and masses of increase which could not move out away from the mother rhizome, so the clumps were really tight and congested. From late Nov 2003 through to around May 2004, I gradually dug all my beds (4 beds, 18ft X 9ft each) one at a time. I removed every clump from a bed, culled a lot of very poor doers, took only the very best rhizomes from each clump, carefully named them, trimmed them back and put them aside - 1 large plant pot for each variety. Then I rotary hoed in 1 trailer load of black sand (the sort that doesn't set like concrete) 1 big bag of gypsum, and 1/2 trailer load of well rotted cow manure. Once I had a fine tilth, I dug 5 trenches, evenly spaced, across the beds, and raked the soil up into 6 beds, around 6" higher than they had been before. Then I planted the rhizomes back in to the fresh bed, and started work on the next bed. It took ages, but it paid off. I have a fifth bed to do this year. It wasn't too bad before but has dropped a bit. Clay is generally very fertile, but you need to keep it from getting either too wet or too dry. Generally it is not a good idea to mulch bearded irises, but I would advise you to try, at least with part of a bed, to see if you can keep the clay moist. I use pea straw on some beds, and find the irises do quite well. It keeps the weeds down and the soil friable, but I have to continually scrape the mulch back away from the rhizomes, as the blackbirds fling it round. Yes irises do suffer from sunburn in Australia, and you may be able to overcome this simply by covering them with handfulls of sand in summer. I would recommend you do a soil test for pH, and if the soil is on the acid side, be very liberal with lime. You probably don't need to fertilise, and once the soil is lightened, and easy to work, you shouldn't need to water them every 2 days. Once a fortnight is plenty. watering in the hottest part of summer will often create humidity round the rhizome, and result in rot. That's probably more than you wanted to know, so i'll stop ther :-) Cheers, Jan