hi I'm Kendall Richard from Pleasant Valley iris farm today I'm going to teach you about how to dig up irises and separate them the proper way I the reason you dig up irises and separate them is because after several years usually three or four years the irises get very compact and they don't have anywhere to grow so they stopped blooming as nicely as they normally would so you dig them up separate them you have a lot more plants to give to friends or put around your garden and then they'll bloom much nicer for you the first thing that you do is first of all the reason or the time that you dig up irises is usually in August because the plants are semi dormant at that time when there's some my dormant they look not as as nice as they do in the springtime there's a lot of dead leaves and that sort of thing so the first thing that I do before I dig them up is I clear away all the dead leaves so that you have a clean garden and you just rip them off and kind of pull them out it's not going to hurt a mini and clean up all of these you know the debris around the plant so that you have an easier way of working with the plant and then what you do is you use something like this is a great tool to use this is what i use and if you don't have one of these a pointy shovel will be fine and then you just go around the clump of your iris with the the digging tool and just pull it back and you're going to hear it kind of rip and you don't have to worry about that the the the irises will grow all new roots so don't worry about them you know ripping out of the ground and you just go all the way around to the plant we gave them up this is a pretty large clump there you have a lot of new plants that this one when it's all nice and loose hopefully as you dig them up some of the the clumps will have broken apart already so you don't have such a tour of digging everything up and if you pull it out of the ground like that and you can see you've got the rhizome here the old rhizomes and the new new rhizome you can just shake off the dirt and pull up all those Swedes again and then you just where the rhizome connects to the other rhizome you just you just break it right apart right where it connects like that and all of these are new little babies that will be full rhizomes next year they'll be good sized rhizomes next year and then you can plant those separately next year but I would not suggest breaking them off now and then you just replant this in the ground you you don't need to you know to break them all apart at this time just well this one is and I just plant this whole thing in the ground as a new plant and then you just continue on with the clump pulling out the new rides on and this is a new one also by next summer all of these will be fully grown plants and you'll have quite a few on this fish plants as well here's another one and so that's about it you just dig them up and when you plant the the new rhizomes in the ground you want to wait at least a day so that the new the newly separated portion right here seals over so that you don't get bacteria from the soil into the rhizome you can also sprinkle it with Ajax or comet cleanser and that will also take care of the problem so that you don't spread any kind of disease into the plant and that's about it thank you for joining us today and if you'd like to see more videos you can visit our website at www iris farmer com thank you