All of your roots look really awesome! Hope to see all of your new flowers next year.

Love Solaris Farms peonies. They never sent me a mislabel root.

Solaris Farms is widely popular among peony hybridizers too. The plants he has often make for good parent plants for crossing. He has worked with Bill Seidl and Bill is a tree peony champion known worldwide.

Harvey is great too. Both extremely knowledgeable and very kind .

I bought two peonies from Alexandra Kashianova on the Planet Peony Facebook page. They were really nice. She is in Canada, so you folks up there who need another place to buy from should check her out. Here's the photo of what I bought from her.

I am so over peony planting season. Never realized how spoiled I made myself by getting most of the hard work making new raised beds early--actually having to dig holes in hard clay and mix in compost and decent soil--I spent 8 hours planting around 30 herbaceous and 6 tree peonies yesterday. Had to stop putting up the edging around the beds to get the roots in--the whole thing looks a mess! Got drip line down on the 2 beds that are partially filled and the one that is at capacity today. I wanted to move some of my existing peonies into one of the beds so that I can revamp the bed they're in now; that'll probably be waiting until next year. I am DREADING the last 2 boxes...

Had even more peonies to plant from Gold City than I expected. I tried to order from them while I was on vacation but never saw the charge go through. Figured I'd screwed up and not actually bought any so redid the order when I got home, ended up getting both orders! And they doubled almost everything in one of the boxes! THOUGHT I was getting 7 peonies from them, ended up with 18, some of which I got 3 roots of a single variety and duplicates on a few others. Expensive and tiring mistake....

I know I'll be happy I did the work right next spring but right now I really want to go back to work to rest!!!!

I got out today after taking a 'day off' to do house work. Weather was going to break and rain tonight so I got out there and dug up the rest of the bed I decided to plant all the peonies in. Had to dig out an area of lamium mixed with grass. What a mess. I also put new commercial edging inside the brick to contain the dirt in the bed. Used my soil sieve to knock as much soil out of the grass/lamium I dug up. What a chore. But all but two peonies are planted and labeled. Three pieces left of Border Charm I cut up and I want them in the newly joined bed in the front. Will use that bed for dahlias next year along with adding an hydrangea from the back yard and two Ninebark with three forsythia. Then will just 'lay in' iris, lilies and ground cover to keep them alive til next year. Snow is coming soon. The back yard is pretty much going under the snow as is. I will pile up what I have cut up and if I have time continue to cut down plants for grinding. Not sure how much time I have left. I only put in about four or five hours as it is below freezing in the morning with frost every where. I can't handle the cold so wait til after noon to start digging.

Sounds like exhausting as it may have been, you had a lot of progress made, MaryStella and Liz. Way to go.

It is hard getting everything done, especially when the weather does not cooperate. So wet here, can't do anything. Have had an order over a week but saturated soil is not a good scene.

All better this morning, over feeling sorry for myself! Hope the snow holds off a while longer so you can get everything taken care of Mary. And hope the rain stops for you for a while, Tracey! I'm off to dig 4 more holes this morning for bits and pieces left over from 2 days ago, and maybe have time to do some more edging....we'll see!

DH comes home from a short business trip and will be grinding mulch for me. BuggyCrazy just sent a note and is sending me FOUR bulbs from a lily I sent her a few years ago. I had two and shared with her some of the whatever you call them when you peel pieces off. Then it died in my garden the next spring. I am so thrilled and grateful as this lily was only offered briefly by Judith TLG and never again. I am putting it in a primo spot in the new bed with pillows and blankies and all I can think of to make it happy and healthy.

So today I will finish up the last little corner of the bed I put the peonies in yesterday, then place lilies and iris and edging. Will preen then bed then mulch. If the weather continues how it is now, it is not too late for those blasted chickweed seeds to germinate, mulch or no mulch. It rained lightly but is 42F this morning rather than the 29F it has been running. Great for the peonies to get as many new roots as possible.

I still have to figure out what to do with the huge new bed. I have some bushes to put in and metal posts to put up to add wire to as a moose fence. Hopefully it will keep the moose out . Not so much their munching as there is little to much on (they could do some damage to the little bushes) but their big hoofies dig terrible holes and if they land on a tuber, Oh, that reminds me. I need to mix up a batch of Planskyyd to spray also. Is pretty effective in repelling moose. Smells awful but does the job.

Liz and Mary it sounds like you are both getting a lot done this weekend. Just think about how gorgeous spring is going to be next year.

It was a beautiful 60 degree morning here. I split my potted Julia Rose to mail a piece to another gardening friend. The root ball was a long, narrow mess. I tried cutting with my larger shears, but had no room the get the blades in. I wound up using my serated knife to get through the tough root ball.

I repotted the piece I'm keeping, and I'll plant it later, when the soil begins to cool down here. Our red clay is also like concrete right now, and would be very difficult to dig.

Kudos to you, Liz and Mary for taking on such huge tasks of bed transformations. You gals are in great shape. I get tired from just hearing all the work that you have done and plan to do. I think what takes you days will take me weeks to get done. Good luck!

Annette, if you can get through the root with a serrated knife means that it is not too bad yet. I have heard that a saw is necessary in some cases.

I guess I am not the only one, Annette, that is perplexed about cutting peony roots. I don't see how vendors produce those clean tidy roots they send. Mine (Border Charm and Lemon Chiffon) looked like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre when I was done. I guess the proof will be if the six pieces I came up with (it broke up badly when I was trying to get it out of the ground where it had been for around 5 years) when I finally got it out of the ground. So the 'dividing' was done in the digging up process. All the pieces, and some are fairly large, have eyes. Don't necessarily want four (gave two away) of them, but for the time being I am using them to form an edge (it is somewhat draping in from) in a new garden. If they survive I will give the extras to friends next spring.

Thanks Karen but believe me the process is far from lovely for me. I just keep on pushing myself, quite often sort of staggering and losing my balance as the job progresses. I just refuse to stop. I used to be able to work like that eight or more hours a day. Now, if I get in a productive four I am pleased. Key is never give up! No matter how much you may want to.

Slicing a peony root, both herbaceous root and tree peony root is something I have always wanted to see a grower do a live demo on.

Here is my order from Peonies Plus. These were in separate plastic bags with a pit of peat moss, but they were loose in the box. I would have stuffed newspaper in to keep them from tossing around. As you can see, 'Langley' broke into pieces. I don't know if it is an adventitious variety, but I will plant all the pieces . ' Command Performance' was fine.

Annette's pic #2 is what you can expect to find after a few years from being planted into too small of a hole.

Jerry, wouldn't they just grow out of the hole or are you talking about potted peonies. I heard that tree peonies have smaller roots and that they actually do better in pots due to that fact.

Well, this is certainly a disappointment. This is an Itoh ' Momotara Peach Boy' from Fina Gardens. Nice eyes, but only that one root to support all that crown!

Here is the rest of my Fina Gardens order. These are very large, and despite the hollow parts should do very well.

Boy they don't send much root do they. But Itoh's are pretty tough.

I think we had mentioned this in prior posts. Peony roots, much the same as any plant, will always grow toward the nutrients and moisture which are the most easy to reach. A small hole in poor soil helps block the reach of the roots, especially when the hole is backfilled with fertile soil. The old saw about preparing a $100 hole for a $10 plant covers the subject well.