Irises

Recently, as flowers began blooming, I was surprised how many different kinds of irises we had. Well, I only have five, but they are of a wide variety. I've been considering planting irises in the yard lately, although I've been told how finicky they can be. It all seem like a Catch-22 to hear about. If you don't divide irises every few years, they will stop blooming - or when you divide irises, they may not bloom the next spring. I think there is some truth to these statements. I have seen irises get overcrowded and they definitely don't bloom as much - I walked by the house tonight and there only one bloom out of probably close to a hundred irises. I have also had experience with irises not blooming until the second spring after they were divided - and I've also had ones that bloomed the next spring. I think it really depends on how soon after they finish blooming do you divide them. The soon the better, probably.

The first iris we had was here when we bought the house. The first spring there were only a few, so they didn't get much attention. A couple of years went by and I noticed them again - I really liked them for some reason. I looked them up and found out they are Yellow Flag Irises - Iris pseudacorus. I was pointing them out to my grandmother and she was very familiar with them. She said when she and my grandfather would go out in the boat, she would see them growing on the banks. I dug some up and put them in the bog as an experiment, but it was a bust. Not that they did badly - it was just the end of their blooming and they got droopy and I didn't have the patience for it. Last year I marked the handful (less than ten) we had so I could dig them up later and move them, but that didn't happen - I haven't decided where to put them. They came up this year and I had about fifty of them - talk about invasive! Yes, they are on a number of invasive species lists around the country, but I'm keeping them.

I've got two different bearded irises, but I don't know what kind. I tried looking up some of the irises and there were just too many that I gave up. These two are a good representations of how finicky irises can be. The first one I got because someone was throwing them out. It was October 2008 and someone was selling/buying a house on my route. The junk started to pile up on the street, including a rotting half whiskey barrel planter full of irises. I threw it in my truck and took it home. I spent the evening digging and dividing the irises, ending up with at least forty plants. I found a spot in the yard for them and planted them within a couple of days. Much to my surprise, they bloomed the following spring.

I'm not sure when I got more bearded irises - it seems like it wasn't too much later than I got the others. One of my coworkers brought them in and left them in the break room for someone to take. They sat there several days before I decided to take them. They may have sat at our house for a while longer before I found a place for them in the yard. Maybe it seems like I got them so much longer ago, because they didn't bloom the first spring. I finally started noticing buds on them before Easter just recently. When we got back from vacation, they were in full bloom - sort of a creamy white color.

The next two irises are both water irises - sometimes they are called Japanese Irises, or Louisiana Irises - I'm not really sure. There was a lot of non-specific information on irises that I found. The first water iris I bought from Dream Gardens in March 2008, right after I finished the bog. I bought it a little too late, because it had just finished flowering for the year - I had to wait until spring 2009 to see it flower, and when it did, it was so nice to see - sort of a deep purple flower - the woman at Dream Gardens said that you can tell the color of the flower by the color on the leaves. In this case she was right, but I don't know if that's true all of the time. It's putting out buds again this year and about to bloom. I'm planning to divide it afterward and find someone who wants some of it. (In the photo, the flower isn't open completely. To see a photo from last year, click here.)

The other water iris I don't know much about. I got some small plants that looked like irises at a koi club plant swap summer 2008. They never bloomed and I took a few to one of the Park Circle plant swaps, where an old lady questioned whether they were really irises at all. All I could say was, "don't they look like irises to you?" I planted them in a few small pots and put them in the top of my pond filter/waterfall where I've ignored them until recently. I was looking for something to do in the yard the other evening when I decided to clean the dead stuff out of the pond filter. I was pulling dead iris leaves and water hyacinth out when I noticed buds on the plants. Once again I was completely surprised that they were about to bloom. I had written them off, but it seems that over the last couple of years, they've matured into large irises that have almost taken over the filter. These need to be thinned out too - but not until they finish blooming. I've seen these flowers for the first time and they are a paler purple than the other ones.

I take it back - that I only have five different irises. It just occurred to me that I was leaving some out. I just remembered that this past summer that Robin and I took a "Spontaneous Craigslist Roadtrip". I may be the first person to use this term, but not the first to actually do this. Imagine reading a craigslist post titled "Curb Alert" - someone has thinned out their irises and put them on the curb. Robin comes home and I say, "how do you feel like driving to Summerville to get plants off the side of the road?" Robin replies, "when do you want to go?"

We put them in shopping bags so we didn't get too much dirt in the car, and when we got home I put the bag in the back yard, intending to do something with them in the near future. I haven't touched them since! They've obviously rooted in the ground now and they're putting out new growth, but they're in the same place I dropped the bag more than six months ago. I've got some yard work to do this weekend, like pulling weeds in the back yard - I'm planning to do something with those irises as well.

Yucca vs. Landscapers

There are a few interesting yuccas in front of an apartment building on my route. I've been interested in them the past few years. They're not just green - they're more pale and a little blue. I did some research and, to the best of my knowledge, they called yucca pallida. Last year, one of them started to produce a flower spike. Once it straightened up, the small stems that hold the flowers started to pop out, and just as the flowers were about to open...the landscape maintenance crew chopped it off! That's how life goes sometimes.

When I got back from vacation last week, I noticed that all three of these yuccas were forming flower spikes and I thought I would document this - including when they get chopped off again. I managed to get a few photos, but it was with my cell phone, so they're not the best. This is just a little something I wanted to write about and I'll post an update if (when) they get chopped off.

Spring Park Circle Plant Swap

This past Saturday was the Park Circle Plant Swap. We had been out of town for spring break earlier in the week, so I didn't have a lot of time to get my plants together. I had a good idea what I wanted to take, but after our winter there wasn't a lot around to take. The morning of the swap, I sorted through the plants in the driveway, deciding which to keep and which to swap. I ended up taking some sago palms, Mexican petunia, wild garlic, dwarf papyrus, a few cactuses and a handful of daffodils. Oh, and some plant I got off the side of the road, divided and repotted. It turns out it might be a wax myrtle.

There were definitely a lot more people at the swap this time - it just keeps getting more popular. Unfortunately, the plant selection wasn't thrilling. I say that, but I should mention that the plants were a lot of what I already have. There was nothing I was extremely excited by.

I did get some interesting things - a loropetalum (a shrub that we probably won't plant and it will die of neglect), Chinese lantern, peppermint, sugarcane, daylilies, succulent (for the desert garden), dried apple gourd (for the seeds), and a few other things. In hindsight, it was a nice morning. I have some things I like - I think I just have too much to do in the yard.

Assessing Winter Casualties

Since the weather has warmed up so much, I've been meaning to assess all the damage that our unusually cold winter did to our plants. I will say that most things came back as expected. Daylilies are thriving, bog lilies and hostas too. Most of our winter casualties are not too surprising. I had a majesty palm I bought 15 months ago and overwintered it original in the garage. Temporarily I dug a hole by the pond and put the whole thing, pot and all, in the ground, intending to plant it later that year- I put it in the hole, because it kept blowing over. I was concerned that it was a little too tropical to be outside all year and I was right - at least this past year. It shows no signs of life.

Most of my original shade garden died back, including the ferns I got off the side of the road, the ferns I got from the woods and the hostas that I divided last year. After dividing it last April, I had four plants until the other day - I only saw one coming back, but as of now all four are back, and I'm glad. Another plant that's back are the ferns we got out of the woods last summer. They're sprouting again with more foliage than before.

Almost a year ago I rescued some sort of pine that Lowe's sells during Xmas - It's evergreen and they put red and gold bows and decorations on it like an Xmas tree. This pine had certainly been neglected, but it didn't look half bad. I repotted it and it thrived during the summer in the partial shade near the back of the house. When fall came, I tossed the African daisies that were in a planter near the front door and put this pine in it - I figured it would be something good for the fall and winter. After the cold winter we had this year, it just got burned and the needles turned brown. I just assumed it died from the cold, it looked so bad. At that point it wasn't worth saving.

Another plant you could say I gave up on was my Black Magic Taro. It sat all summer and fall in a tub of water in the driveway, waiting to be planted in the bog. Needless to say it didn't survive, if I'm writing about it here. While the elephant ears in the bog were coming back to life, I waited on the ones in the container to do the same, but no such luck. If I really want more, I can always get some from the people I gave some to.

Lastly, a few thing I got at the fall plant swap didn't make it. This always happens - usually by neglect, because I always have so many plants that I can't take care of. However, these were more winter casualties. Fairly early in the fall we had to bring in the "Black Pearl" ornamental pepper - apparently it doesn't like anything below 60 degrees. Our house is a death trap for most plants - ironic, isn't it? We just don't get much sunlight. After several years I've adapted to this. We have a peace lily, cast iron plant, a pteris fern and an African violet, and they're all doing fine.

Victory Gardens

Since the "Great Recession", a lot more people have started vegetable gardening. Lowe's has been a big supplier of seeds and plants to novice vegetable gardeners or those people who only grow vegetables in the summer. (I don't want to sound like I'm an expert or above those people in any way) I was impressed in the last couple of years when I saw onion sets there in the spring. I felt like they were broadening their customers' horizons. This spring I saw it get even broader - Lowe's had a couple of different products that were like gardens in a box. One had a half dozen potatoes, onion sets, asparagus crowns, strawberry plants and something else. They had a larger version that included a couple of varieties of potatoes, as well as other plants. On a later trip, I saw similar, but more specialized products - one had three or for different types of potatoes, one had garlic, leeks, shallots and onions. It was very interesting, and it was timed right as far as when to plant them goes.

I started thinking of the different type of vegetables you can grow and in conversations with people, I realize that a lot of people don't know when you can grow different types of plants. People are surprised to hear that I was growing vegetables this past winter - our lettuce was planted in November and we made a salad from it today. This lack of knowledge and the vegetable seeds available at Lowe's made me think. I was browsing seeds, looking for watermelon and pole beans, when I saw onion and broccoli seeds alongside tomato and squash seeds. I started wondering how many people would try to plant vegetables at the wrong time. Wouldn't it be a good idea, and a way for Lowe's to reach out to the community, if they had a few signs - local vegetable planting guides prepared by master gardeners from the Clemson Extension?

This is just a thought I had when I was at Lowe's the other day and thought I would share it. Happy gardening!