hey everyone Catherine with Colorado yard care let me show you how I clean up bearded iris and spring severity of iris are probably one of the absolute most easiest plan to take care of and so that's a great reason to plant them what you should know about German iris is that they grow in a circle so we remove the weeds and all the mulch from this area you see this open center here and the original plant was probably planted right here and then fear after it was planted it probably grew about one or two inches outward and these leaves would have been in a circle right in this area and then the following year those leaves fell off and then it grew another couple inches outward and you can see now that we've got this circle of leaves growing right here and the rhizomes or the underground stems they're always pointing from the center of the plant up to where the leaves are growing you can see another rhizome right here and another rise on right here so to clean up iris and spring all we're trying to do is take off all the old growth and then allow the plant to continue growing so you can see that these are the leaves that grew last year that are brown and we'll never green up again and these are the new green leaves for this year and so pretty basic we just go ahead and come in here and pull out these leaves if we can pull them out by hand that works great because you're not using tool that can potentially damage the new leaves but sometimes you're going to run into an old leaf that is a little tough and with that you may need to get a pair of pruners and just come in and clip that leaf pop now what do you do about a leaf like this where it's half green and half brown you can just go ahead and snip it off just like this one is half green half brown let's snip it up snip it off at an angle and it's all cleaned up so one thing I just go ahead and mention is that these leaves are quite succulent and so if you come in here like I did in bonk one it breaks because it's so stiff so it really does take some you have to be a little careful I guess is what I'm saying so that you don't come in and break all the leaves while you're cleaning up another thing I like to do is use my hand as a rake and just lift any old leaves from the surrounding trees up and out of the iris you know iris is really don't like to be covered with a lot of materials the rhizomes actually like to be right at soil level so anything you can do to lift off any material will benefit them so let me clean up this plant and then I'll show you what it looks like afterwards you okay so here's just a bit more of a top view and I wanted to show you you can really now see the ring how the iris grows on the ring and you can see the rhizomes which are those fleshy brown parts where the leaves are connecting if your iris has a big dead center in the middle then it's time to divide it and I will cover that in a future video but don't do it in the spring the best time to do that in Colorado is in August so for now just go ahead and clean it up and let it do its thing for summer every once in a while you'll come across a stem that is actually circular a bit tougher than the older leaves and that's just an old flowering stem and you can just come in with your pruners and trim those right off I trim them off as close as I can get to ground level without damaging the new leaves so one question you might be asking right now is whether or not you shouldn't be mulching irises and I do I use a woodchip mulch all the way around the irises but in between the leaves and then in the middle I keep it quite light so maybe about an inch or two deep just to keep the weeds down but you don't want to bury irises especially with soil on top of the rhizomes one of the main reasons why irises don't bloom is because people plant them too deep so you don't want to have this beautiful iris and then bury it under a bunch of soil and mulch so go ahead and multiply each layer a little bit thinner than you normally would so that's about as easy as freeing cleanup gets that's how you clean up bearded iris and spring thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video Oh