So you are telling me, if I have a large clump of irises, I need to divide them and spread them out, if I want to see bloom?
That could partly explain
some of what I am seeing, however I have two crowded clumps of 'Sweet Musette' and both put on a good show last year. I'll have to wait and see how much bloom I get this year (admittedly, I am seeing very few scapes coming up).
(Yeah, I'm a lazy gardener. I don't even divide the daylilies unless driven to it. I have one that I really love that I think clearly needs dividing, but it is up in a tall planter box, and it is going to be a real pain to get that out. This close to bloom season, I'm not sure that I want to try.)
Since I have your attention wrt scarcity of bloom, I have to ask about fertilizers. In previous years I liquid fertilized the irises with a 16-16-16 (or maybe it was 3-20-20?) Maxsea fertilizer. (I may also have previously scratched in an all-purpose fertilizer, Osmcote, which I think is 15-9-12, on the potted irises.) This year I fertilized with granular 5-10-5, and a bit of superphosphate on a couple of clumps, since that is what I discovered I
should be using... or am I wrong?
Because right now bloom is looking no better than last year, and for some irises, even worse. (Those irises I think are definitely now getting too much shade; when I looked last week, I did not see a single stalk coming up.)
