this video is brought to you by Osmocote the planters plant food hi I'm Ryan Lee from Indiana University and today I've got a gardening tip about irises this was a question that was written into us and an email about how to propagate how to divide irises so I thought I would take on this subject so irises are perennial flowers they're really an old-fashioned flower they have a really nice big bloom that's very fragrant typically blooms in the two mid to late spring these are actually tall bearded irises there are dwarf versions there are several different sizes these will get upwards as a two or three foot tall again in the late spring the problem with irises is that they bloom a very short amount of time and then you're left with this this foliage so if you're gonna plant irises you really want to think about planning it for the foliage not as much for the flowers although the flowers are very nice you're left with foliage a long part of the year a large part of the year irises grow on rhizomes which are horizontal horizontal stem structures they will bloom once per lifecycle that means that you'll get one bloom out of the flower and then that flower or that plant becomes a mother plant it shoots out other rhizomes which will bloom once and then they become mothers and shoot out more rhizomes so to keep your your iris patch flowering really nicely ever so so many years of a couple years you need to go in and thin out those irises and so you can give these things away to your friends or you can make yourself a bigger iris patch so I'm going to show you how to do that to separate these things you simply break them off I a lot of people will tell you to use a knife I they're they're pretty Hardy plants in my hands irises are second only to day lilies in terms of hardiness they're they're just really sturdy plants alright so when you break these things off you want to look for any disease so a really common disease of irises is a bacterial wilt which we'll get into this rhizome and just cause it to be mushy if you see any of that just throw it away keep it away from your iris patch you know you don't have to be too stingy with these things there should be a lotta rise in there when you plant an iris you want to plant it such that the rhizome is really level with the ground or slightly above it if you plant it too deep you'll cause the rhizome to to rot and your plant will die so you plant these things with roots down leave the rhizome slightly above the ground some people will tell you to cut some of these leaves that's so that the wind doesn't come and knock them over because a pretty top-heavy as they are if you're gonna cut the leaves leaves and leave as much as you possibly can because that's gonna produce all the food that causes these roots to grow and thus bloom next year alright so when do you do this you can transplant irises anytime you get ready to but you want to leave them enough time so that they can grow some roots before the freeze so anywhere from up until a few weeks before the first freeze in the winter it's best to do it after they bloom so it's early spring here in south-central Indiana if I transplanted these now I'm not gonna get a bloom out of them this year however they will root and next year they're most likely bloom after planting these things you don't want to mulch over the top of them and that is that is a problem with irises so these these rhizomes sit on top of the ground you can't put mulch over the top of them or you'll cause them to rot that means that you get a lot of weeds and irises it's another good reason to break them up every few years so they can weed out in between the irises this has been a gardening tip from Ryan Lee from Indiana University about bearded irises propagation thanks for watching