About 20 years ago I bought 3 potted Alaska Iris Setosa at a local garden plant show and put them in my yard. These hardy perennials do very well in Alaska and produce very beautiful flowers in our long Alaska Summer days.
I soon learned that Iris would multiply and needed to be dug up and have the roots divided every few years. I also added more flower beds to replant the divided iris and added more perennial flowers.
To add some variety to my perennial Iris I started a wide variety of Lily bulbs early this year. Potted Lily plants for sale in the summer can be expensive but bulbs are much les expensive and are available much earlier in most garden centers. They do seem to sell out fast as the weather warms up so I bought some very early and kept them in my refrigerator until the weather started warming. I gave them a head start inside my tomato greenhouse. They seemed to do pretty well and I am anxious to see how hardy they are in my Alaska climate.
I also learned about flower bed design and my original bed with a rock boarder was just too wide for easy maintenance or weeding. The rock boarder was also impossible to keep weed free and trimmed. It was time for a complete design change.
This meant removing the rock boarder, digging all of the Iris, and dividing the roots for replanting in a new smaller bed design. The bed was very overgrown with weeds and grass so this sod layer had to be completely removed and the subsoil tilled with extra compost added.
The new bed design was smaller and this left an area that needed new grass seeding. The soil was tilled and sifted with some compost added. The pile of rocks from the boarder also needed to be moved.
This left a lot of divided Iris plants that I really did not need so they were offered for sale and I sold 50-60 potted Iris to other local gardeners.
I also had other areas that needed help and more Iris that needed to be divided. So I dug up and redesigned another bed as well.
Instead of making this bed smaller, I divided it into two beds with a paver walkway in between for easy access.
I purchased a flat of petunias for some color while the other plants become established.
I still had extra potted flowers so I decided to make a new flower bed. Digging out the sod and tilling the subsoil.
My newest bed is all planted with Iris and Lilies and watered in. I still have a few plants left to decide where they might go? Gardening for me is a learning process seeing what works and what fails. I continue learning about gardening up North…
Nobody promised gardening would be easy …but it is worth it.