How to Plant Iris Correctly for Long Term Success

hi everyone its Katherine with Colorado yard care and today I'm gonna share with you how to plant irises in your garden for long-term success now before I show you how to plant irises I do want to go over a few things about how irises grow so that you'll understand why we do certain things when we plant them so irises are amazing plants they're extremely adaptable and they resist all sorts of weird weather events and they come back year after year not to mention they have beautiful gorgeous flowers in a variety of colors and you can stagger the bloom times of different types of irises to create a beautiful display in your yard all summer long so this is a part of an iris that I dug up from another part of my yard and I just want to share with you a little bit about its biology irises grow as a set of fans of leaves and this particular piece of iris has three fans you can see there's one here the second one is right here and there's a third one developing over on the on my right each set of leaves is associated with an underground rhizome which is an underground section of stem that gives irises their amazing superpowers this is the part of the plan that stores the water and the food that allows irises to get through tough times now keep in mind that the rhizome is not the roots if you flip it over you can see that these long structures are actually the roots that take up the moisture and the nutrients from the soil now as these Leafs grow I just want to point out that the newest leaves are produced on the inside of the fan so this is the newest leaf on this set of leaves here you can see it's poking up and then these two are the next newest leaves these two are a little bit older and then this one on the bottom is the oldest leaf of this particular fan and so it's a natural process for irises throughout the growing season to shed their leaves so if you look at an iris clump that hasn't been tended in awhile you'll see these brown leaves throughout the iris clump and it's okay to just go ahead and pull them off because they're the older leaves of the plant when you buy an iris from a nursery you usually buy it one of two ways first they might sell it to you as a potted plant which means that you're buying the rhizome and the roots and the leaves in a pot with potting soil or if you buy it at a rhizome sale or you buy it through mail-order you might actually just get the rhizome with some roots which they may or may not trim to fit in the package as well as some leaves that'll be cut to about 4 to 5 inches high and that's actually perfectly fine because the rhizome is the important part of the plant as long as you have a healthy rhizome with some leaves and a few roots then the plant can regenerate from there so when you're planting irises it's critical that you get this rhizome at the correct depth in the soil I think what happens sometimes is people mistake the rhizome for the roots and so they plant this rhizome facing downward in the soil where the roots should be and that's gonna create a problem because if your rhizomes are too deep then your irises will produce a lot of leaves but they won't produce any flowers also if you plant this rhizome too high then it's going to be too exposed to the elements and your irises won't thrive so I'll show you how to get the rhizome to the correct depth in this soil so now that I've talked a little bit about how irises grow let me show you how to plant them so the first step is to dig a hole that's about 12 inches in diameter and about 6 inches deep now irises can grow in a wide variety of soils but they do need decent drainage so if you have an area that consistently has stagnant water that's not a good place for your irises because they need good drainage in order to thrive so now once we have our hole dug the next step is to build up a mound of soil in the center of the hole so we can place our rhizome on it and make sure that it'll stay at the correct soil level so I just take some of the soil that I dug out of the hole and build it up and then I need to sort of see if my rhizome is going to be at the correct height so I get my rhizome and place it on top of the mound and an easy way to determine if you're at the right height is to put your shovel across the hole and the bottom of your shovel is going to be even with the existing soil surface you want the top of your rhizome to be even with the bottom of the shovel if it's too low then you can add a little bit more to the mound and if it's too high then you can take soil off of the mound all right and you want to kind of firm this mound enough so that when after you plant your iris your a rhizome doesn't sink over time okay so that's actually looking pretty good now there's all sorts of recommendations out there about which way to orient your iris leaves now in my mind it doesn't really make much of a difference because over time what's going to happen is after you plant this rhizome it's going to develop new rhizomes to the side with new fans of leaves so ultimately your irises are going to grow in a ring and it won't matter which way you're originally planted the leaves but in the short term it does matter so what I like to do is I figure out which way I'm most likely to view the iris and in this case I'm going to view it from this side most of the time so I like to place my rhizome so the leaves are perpendicular to my main view line and the reason for this is because irises have such amazing beautiful leaves that you want to get the full effect of their gorgeous foliage now if I turned this iris clump like this then I wouldn't be able to see the beautiful leaves quite as much so I'm going to turn make sure that I orient my leaves like this because I'm viewing it from this direction and now I'm ready to start planting the iris so the next step is to turn the rhizome over and sort of spread out the roots so that they're not tangled they're facing outward and they can sit on that mound of soil and so if you have just one rhizome you can kind of part them down the middle but in think in this case we have two so we just naturally let those roots go to the side we've got our rhizome oriented in the correct position it's at the right height and the next step is to go ahead and cover all of the iris roots with soil you want to make sure that all of the roots are covered with the soil because if not then they'll dehydrate and die and the roots are a very important part of the iris plant and this also helps firm the iris in place so it doesn't fall over now as you're planting you want to make sure that your rhizome is kind of sloping slightly downward towards the center and that your iris leaves are perpendicular to the ground you don't want to have your iris leaves like this and you don't want to plant the rhizome facing too much downward either okay so we've got that in place that looks good now what we're going to do is just continue to replace the backfill soil around the rhizome and adjust the height of the rhizome as needed but we're actually looking really good here we'll cover those roots that were in between those two rhizomes and if you need to get your rhizome a little bit lower then you can kind of wiggle it downwards and if you need to raise it up a bit you can wiggle it upwards okay now one thing I do like to do is take a handful of soil and place it on the side opposite of the rhizomes and just Pat it in place and this helps stabilize the leaves and the rhizomes so they don't fall over until those roots regrow and secure the rhizome in place all right so that's looking really good now just to double-check I have my existing soil level right here and if I rub my hand across where the rhizomes are I can feel them but they're not sticking up above the existing soil grade and that's exactly where you want them all right and then the next step that I do is here in the semi-arid West I create a berm of soil around the planting hole so that when I hand water the plants after planting the water doesn't run downhill that just helps establish the plants better because it keeps the soil around the new plants nice and moist if you live in a wetter climate this isn't necessary and in fact you probably don't want to trap moisture around your newly planted plants but here where I live in Colorado that's really important okay now if you are planting irises in a garden setting where you have space in between the plants it is important to put mulch on the soil so you don't get weeds growing in your garden now when you're mulching around irises you can mulch on the backside you can mulch all the way around the sides but don't place mulch right on top of these rhizomes you want to let them have bare soil right above this area I'm going to give this plant a little bit of water and we'll finish up after you water the so we'll start to settle and that's where you can fine-tune any last bit of soil grade issues so that's how you plant irises for long-term success thanks for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: Catherine Moravec

Views: 193,741

Rating: 4.9188533 out of 5

Keywords: Iris, irises, planting iris, planting irises, planting iris rhizomes, how to plant iris, how deep to plant irises

Id: ZbARqVDriJA

Length: 10min 54sec (654 seconds)

Published: Fri May 29 2020