Now for the gardening aspect of this blog. Last night I started watering again, and I was taking a good look at my plants. My bearded iris are hanging in there. They don’t look real pretty, but considering they are in full sun with no shade whatever – they are doing fine. Once they are established, bearded iris are drought tolerant. I’ve already lost a couple of crepe myrtles, angels trumpets, and even a salvia. I haven’t trimmed my iris back – I just have too many of them. I will be doing that in late August, when I start to dig some of my bearded iris up and transplant them. August and September are the typical times you transplant bearded iris.

To accomplish transplanting, water your plants 2 – 3 days before hand. Then with a shovel or a garden fork lift the rhizomes. Trim back the leaves to 3 – 4 inches. Break apart the different rhizomes, and let the rhizomes air dry (in the shade) for at least 3 days before replanting them.

To plant them, dig a shallow trench to place the roots in. You can add bone meal to the trench if you want (iris are heavy feeders) and then cover up the roots, but make sure you can still see the top of the rhizomes. Iris do not want to be planted too deep! Water in well for the first week or so.

If you are one of the unlucky gardeners in this awful drought/heat wave, make sure that before you plant your iris in your garden that you have regularly watered the garden. Do not just plant them in a garden that hasn’t been watered for the last several months. The dry soil will not be able to sustain the iris. If you want to plant your iris in pots, then fill your pot half way with potting mix, add a little bone meal, stir it in. The start to place your iris roots in the pot, and fill the potting mix over the roots, again making sure that part of the rhizome stays on top of the soil. Water the pots well for the first couple of weeks and I would keep the pot in the shade if it is still very hot.

Daylily, Rapid Eye Movement

June is here and with it lots of record setting heat and virtually no rain. This year looks like it will be a record breaking year, but not the good records. Even the weeds are having a tough time this year. The good news is that daylilies and iris are both drought tolerant once they have been established. Your plants may look a little peaked, but they should be able to pull through to the fall when they will rebound nicely. There are a couple of strategies that can help them get through the heat.

The first is to make sure that when you do water, you water deeply. Water once a week and at least an inch water around your plants. If you use drip irrigation so much the better, because you won’t be losing water to wind or evaporation. Also you can help by watering either late in the day or early morning. I prefer late in the afternoon/evening because that way the plants will have all night to soak up the water.

The second thing you can do is to add a 2 – 4” layer of mulch around your plant (but not touching the fans). The mulch will help insulate and keep the plant a little cooler. If you have your plants in pots, move the pots where they can get afternoon shade. Your pots will need more water than your plants in the ground, but again drip irrigation will help.

I also know of a friend who trims his daylilies back to about 6 – 9” in the heat of the summer, so the roots don’t have to support as much top growth. I will be doing this on most of my daylilies to help them get through.

With bearded iris, moving or dividing is done in August and September, at which time you would trim them back before re-planting. If you are keeping your bearded iris in place, you can also go ahead and trim any brown tips off or just cut them back to about 4 – 6 inches now.

Daylily in bermuda

The rains we had 10 days ago were great for our plants, but they were even better for the weeds. Every place that we weeded before the rains hit, are now having to be re-weeded for this Saturday’s Spring Garden Day/Markets in the Country event.  I even have Marty out there helping me and no, I will not get them all!

Since I do several areas with seeds, I cannot use a pre-emergent on all of my flower beds. I also have to wait anywhere from 2 – 4 weeks after transplanting daylilies to use a pre-emergent in those beds (you need to let them get established). I also cannot use my pre-emergent on my iris beds. I will say that where I have been able to use a pre-emergent, I still get weeds – just not nearly as many as an untreated bed.

I do use oak leaf mulch on some parts of my garden as well, and in those areas the weeds are a little less, but what I find is the bermuda goes under the mulch and comes up in another place without me seeing it expand.

We are going to try some white plastic mulch this summer on a couple of new beds we are planning. We have stayed away from the black plastic mulch, because we thought it would be too hot for our plants, since we have them in full sun. I also will need to put my flower beds in with transplants/plugs instead of seeds. I will also have to lay our drip tape under the plastic mulch. But if it helps me not have to weed – I’m for it at this point.

Yes I could use various herbicides to help get rid of the weeds, but I really prefer not to use that many chemicals. Ah well, weeding is good dirt therapy for getting frustrations out. On the good side, my daylilies are starting to really bloom and I even have a few straggler iris blooming!

At the Festival of Flowers, I gave the 10:30 am seminar on daylilies. It was a great crowd with lots of eager gardeners. The San Antonio Daylily Society was selling bare root daylilies at the Festival and they essentially sold out of their daylilies – hooray, since it is our club’s main fundraiser. For the seminar, I created and gave a power point presentation (a little different for me), but it allowed me to show a lot more flowers and garden settings using daylilies. I think that I will expand it a little more to include a couple of other items and then I will continue to use it in some of my club and nursery seminars that I give.  At the Festival I didn’t take any daylilies to sell (since SADS was selling them), but I did take bearded iris and dwarf sunflowers (see last week’s blog). They went over great and it was a very successful day.

Next week at the Pearl Brewery Farmer’s Market, the Grand Opening of the Riverwalk Extension is occurring. So it will be another busy and eventful day at the market. Look for our plant listings on Thrusday night/Friday morning on the blog. I will also be giving a daylily and iris seminar at Schultz Nursery on Broadway at 2 pm. It is always great going to Schulz, since they continue to have a great array of choice plants.

In two weeks, June 6th, is our Annual Spring Garden Day here at the ranch, and Markets in the Country with Rhew Orchards (peaches), Green Country Farm (blackberries), and Cooper’s Garden Place. We are expecting a great crowd with lots of things going on. Some of the surrounding garden clubs will be having tables set up with information, and we will also some BBQ (hamburgers and sausage) plates available. We are already planning on what daylilies to have pre-dug for customers, and we will have some potted bearded iris, and other plants in 4″ pots, and 1 gal containers. See our listing of plants the week before the Garden Day. We hope to see a lot of you here even if you just want cruise through the gardens looking at ideas. Kids are more than welcome and we have lots of room for them to run around.

hello darkness bearded iris

Yesterday I had a couple of different bearded iris that were beginning to bloom. The first was Hello Darkness, a tall bearded, which as you can see is a dark beauty as the name implies. The second and quite a surprise was YoYo which is a dwarf. I had just looked at my potted bearded iris the day before and I had not noticed any scapes (flower stalks), and then yesterday I saw color in the pots.

YoYo, bearded iris

 There were 2 different pots of YoYo blooming. This is a great iris for the front of your border since it is a dwarf (about 8 inches tall).

This afternoon I saw another couple of scapes starting on some other iris. It looks like the iris may be a bit late this year, but they are about to start blooming – yippee!

JD2 Ranch, Inc.
grower specializing in daylilies, iris, and seasonal cut flowers

Pearl Farmer’s Market
May 2, 2009 These are some of the items we will be bringing to the market on May 2nd. If you have any specific requests, please e-mail me at jonelle@jd2ranch.com or call me at 830 393-5233. Please check out our website: www.jd2ranch.com to see photos of our plants. Our gardening blog will also have additional information on the farmer’s market and on gardening topics.

Daylilies

Potted:  Winsome Lady, Strawberry Candy, Bitsy, Chorus Line, Royal Palace Prince
Mulberry Connection – specialty
Marked By Lydia – specialty
In Style -specialty
Coronal Light – specialty
Bare root: Hyperion
Mixed

Misc Plants

Bearded Iris – 1 gal pots – various
Gladiolus – 1gal pots
Freesias – 4″ pots
Crocosmia Lucifer – 4″ pots
sedums – 4″ pots
ranunculus – 4″ pots
elephant plant – 4″ pots
peacock orchids (absynian glads) – 4″ pots
Dahlias – Bishops Children 4″ pots

Cut Flowers

Shasta Daisies

Coming Attractions

 cut flowers: Sunflowers, Zinnias, Rudebeckias, Gladiolus -

Now on to more cheerful subjects. Last week we started planting our sunflowers. This year I am planting 4 different kinds. Sunrich Lemon which is 4 – 5 foot tall and a great cutting plant, Florenza which has red and yellow blooms and another great cutting flower. Additionally, I am planting some small Sundance Kids and Sunbright sunflowers which are more bedding and garden type sunflowers. We also started planting some zinnias, cosmos, and rudebekias (black eyed susans) as both plants and for cutting flowers for the Pearl Farmer’s Market. The Sunrich Lemon sunflowers have already started to germinate and I am looking forward to their sunny faces as summer approaches. My cosmos and my rudebekias have also started to germiante. My herbs (basil, thyme, chamomile, oregano, cilantro), scabiosas, lavenders, coreopsis, and dahlias have also started to germinate and are growing nicely.

On the daylily and bearded iris front I am getting more blooms, and I am seeing scapes really starting to pop up. It helped getting a 4/10ths of an inch of rain yesterday. Now if the rain will keep coming every couple of days, I’ll be very happy. Well time for me to go and prepare myself for some more weeding tomorrow – yes, I’ll be listening.

Daylily Seminar at Antique Rose Emporium

This was a full weekend of seminars and rain (we had 1.7 inches over the two days!! now hopefully we will get some more). The first was on Saturday at Fanick’s Garden Nursery in San Antonio on Holmgreen RD. We had a great group of people who wanted to learn more about daylilies and bearded iris. The second was today at the Antique Rose Emporium talking about daylilies. There were lots of questions from both groups and I will cover a few the basic ones that I heard at both groups this weekend.

Many people have heard that only the evergeen daylilies do well down here because of the heat. I have  not found that to be true. I have about half of my daylilies are dormants (their leaves die back in the late fall/early winter and then re-emerge in the spring). They have performed well down here without any problem, and in fact I have a couple of dormants that perform like semi-evergreens or even evergreens. So don’t hesitate to buy a dormant.

The second question was that people were concerned about wether daylilies were cold tolerant. Yes, they are most definately cold tolerant. The are hardy up through the US and into Canada. They even grow some evergreens in Wisconsin. So if you live north of San Antonio you do not need to do anything to prepare them for the winter cold.

I have an old clump (daylilies or iris), when should I divide it? For daylilies you can divide it in either the spring (March through May and sometimes June) or the fall (September through November). For bearded iris, you should divide in the fall (August through October). Bearded iris can be divided at other times, but you won’t necessarily get a bloom that year if you divide in the spring.

What is the biggest mistake people make with daylilies or iris? For daylilies they would be in this order: 1. over watering and letting them stand in water (they want good drainage) 2. planting too deep (plant at the juntion of the crown and the roots) 3. no morning sun. For bearded iris: 1. planting too deep (you should see the top of the rhizome), 2. over watering/poor drainage (bearded iris like water, but they do not like to sit in it), 3. no morning sun, 4. not dividing (when a clump gets old it will stop blooming in the center – a sign to lift and divide).

What and when do I fertilize? For daylilies a long term, slow release fertilizer in the fall and again in the spring, then water soluble fertilizers in the spring.  For bearded iris bone meal in the fall, early spring (Febrauary), and again after they have bloomed. Compost 2 – 4 times per year for all your plants.

In future blogs I will go into more depth on these questions and others. If you have a specific question about either daylilies or iris, please send a comment in and ask me or you can e-mail me directly at jonelle@jd2ranch.com. I will post the answers in the blog, because if one person has a question – others do too.