hi i'm marcie dagman the aspiring gardener and today we're talking about dividing perennial plants and what i have today here is a dwarf hosta a variegated carrots which is a sedge ice dance is what this one's called a clump of orange day lily and a very large clump of primrose now this is a dwarf hosta and you can see it's done for the season but you can still tell where it is so you want to divide your perennials while you can still identify them now this has gotten kind of hard because it's dried out in the sun a little bit so i may have to use a knife to cut this but as you can see it's just a hard compact bunch of roots and you want to try to identify the crowns cut them in half you can't really hurt a hosta and this one i've got a small one this one and another one and that's three hostas out of one little clump a lot of grasses will divide very easily this one is a small clump so i'm going to be able to pull it apart with my hands but if not you can use either a small shovel or a knife like i've done before this one is just i can feel it just easily going to pull apart and there's another one there's three tufts of grass out of one and you know how to plant it by just the way that it was in the ground before just transplant it anywhere just right to the top of that root ball and it'll take off here's a day lily now these generally will grow into a very large clump so this is a smaller clump it's a lot easier to handle a lot of people like to dig up and divide their day lilies every two or three years just to avoid that this one is let's see if i can yeah i'm going to need to give it a little help but it's almost wanting to come apart by hand which is usually my favorite way to try first but again this is not a plant you can harm if you can get a fairly good clump that has a good amount of root on it you'll have another plant see that now this is a really large clump of primrose but it's actually a giant primrose so it's not as big as you think it's got fairly good sized leaves but you can kind of move away each cluster of leaves and see the crowns and that's how you know where to divide a primrose so i'm going to do i'm going to come over here where i can see this crown and i'm going to just take my spade and i'm going to push down and pull away and cut it see that okay there's a lot of soil on here so you can take a lot of that away too if you need to before because the roots are up in this probably the first few inches but there you have that now you can trim back the leaves if you want because they're kind of tattered and worn from the season and just leave those nice little fresh leaves and that's how you divide perennials