It was pretty ratty, even after I was double fisting weeds a couple weeks ago.
I thought that there were daylilies or lilies of some sort in there. I've changed my mind. Unless someone knows of a lily that has a rhizome instead of a bulb, these are all bearded iris. Everything I dug up was a rhizome. Unless there were some I missed. Which is possible under those hostas.
There must have been a lot of reseeding going on too. I found lots of babies that were far away from the main plants. And nearly every rhizome had a little fan of leaves on it. I didn't think they resprouted this late in the season. Unless they had mowed the area before moving out. That might have prompted new leaves.
I was sweating by the time I dug all those rhizomes out. I found several earthworms, including a big daddy nightcrawler. There were also innumerable pillbugs, a few things that looked like mealworms but not, a pupa of some kind, and what looked like a baby purple silverfish. So, despite being yellow clay, it's healthy soil. I added a mixture of reed-sedge peat, sphagnum peat moss, perlite, and washed sand. I'm not happy about the perlite in the garden, but this time a year you can't be picky.
I let the rhizomes sit out and dry for a couple hours. I had overheated enough. And there were a lot of them. For reference, that's a 39 gallon lawn and leaf garbage bag they're sitting on. Everything from old vetern rhizomes to tiny babies.
I admit freely, that I didn't follow any spacing recommendations when I stuck them in the ground. First reason, I hadn't prepared enough garden. Second reason, some were babies and I didn't expect them to do much next year. Third reason, I felt like it. I like crowded displays.
I had thought about adding a ground cover like nasturium to the bed next year. I'm debating that now. There was a lot of periwinkle running through the iris rhizomes, especially those actually in the hostas. And when I say through, I mean the runners were underneath the rhizome and the roots were intermingled. It was a colassal pain to separate them. Not even the mock strawberries were that big a pain.
