Yeah, I know--super melodramatic. I'll eventually post my blooms from this year once they open here, but let me set the stage as a severe thunderstorm has interrupted my first application of beneficial nematodes to control iris borer. Yes, iris borer - that is the catastrophe part.
Last year, I had a horrible bloom season - maybe only 25% of my iris bloomed. Meanwhile, I had iris I'd had for 5 years that had never bloomed, or bloomed once and never again. Some were clearly dying out. I realized I needed more sun, but how?
It seemed that places that had previously been sunny enough had now been shaded by trees that kept growing in the meantime. But, there was a space that I could reclaim.
It had once been a raspberry patch, but was destroyed by my 3 huskies (now all passed) who were avid gardeners but with a very dystopian landscape aesthetic. This sad locale was by that time overrun with locust, sumac, Norway maple seedling, wild grape and weeds.
Starting during bloom season, I began to hack away at this - one 65 year old woman with a battery-powered sawzall, pruners - long and short, shovels, pickaxes, sweat and tears. This took quite a long time. Meanwhile, my iris had so many leaves that were turning brown. This had never happened before, but it coincided with an unseasonable heatwave in the 90s and I figured I was not watering enough because I was so engrossed and exhausted from my sun-creation project.
When I had at last gotten everything cleared, it was July and time to dig and relocate. The first shovel full revealed the horror: a massive iris borer infestation, so bad that (after reading everything I could find) there was no alternative but to dig up every single plant.
Some clumps were large enough that there were many salvageable roots, some had only a couple, in some cases very small. Some were goners, among them my dearly beloved Bravery and Starship Enterprise.
I have always used bone meal - I'm a longtime organic vegetable gardener. I never grew flowers until I moved to the northeast where water falls from the sky. I was from SoCal, and if I was going to pay a fortune for water for plants they had better be edible.
What I learned was, I was born to be flower gardener. I'd grow all these vegetables --way too many for me to eat -- and I realized that I liked growing the plants more than I cared about the produce. I had to cut my veg way back to make way for MORE and MORE iris, but I don't regret it for a minute. I'd rather feast my eyes on the beauty than my stomach on 6 squash varieties (that I'm sick of in a week because every damn thing ripens at once)
So, back to saving my iris. Robin Shadlow of Iris Sisters was good enough to impart some important info, that she digs up all her plants every year (maybe all growers do this, but I had no idea of this!!!) and replants the small roots that are too small to sell but will be bloom-size the next year. She uses a 10-10-10 fertilizer, as many here have talked about.
So I went online looking for such fertilizer: there was none in any of the stores in my small village. In the course of my search I came across a thing called Schulz Bloom Plus 10-54-10 . It had enthusiastic reviews and was economical - only a teaspoon in a gallon of water. Figured "in for a penny, in for a pound" and decided to try this heavy artillery.
I've fed all my iris twice now and the one pound box is not used up. Astonishing! This was very strange, seeing this tiny spoon of blue crystals. But it worked.
Between the sun and feeding, I've reached the point where it's easier to comment on what ISN'T sending up bloom stalks. Some that were near death have increased like gangbusters and are sending up multiple stalks!
I also read about alfalfa tea and epsom salts, so I fed that a few time over the summer too.
So that's how it started, and I'll post the pictures of how it's going. The flowers are coming!!! Stay tuned...
Hey, you've actually read all the way to here,
That was so kind of you to be interested. :
