The Garden Cried Out For Me

Today I did something that I have not done in quite a long time....I spent time in the front yard garden. This garden has been looking a little haggard for quite some time. Usually in the Spring, I put mulch around all of the new season growth and then I jut leave it alone until everything starts dying off, at which time I start to clean it out again for the Fall and Winter months. But this year the garden cried out for a new makeover or at least some serious tidying up. So today I spent about 5 hours giving the garden some serious attention. The main problem with this garden is that it is full of irises. Irises themselves are not problems but actually beautiful flowers. But when you start getting too many in there and they haven't been thinned and split up in a while, they tend to get diseases. Diseases such as leaf spot and bulb rot. The irises in this garden have been battling both over the last couple of years and this year has been particularly bad. I wish that I had known just a little more about irises before I had originally planted them, but like so many other flower varieties....if it looks nice it gets thrown in the garden, sometimes even when space is limited. I could have bought varieties that are more disease resistant than the ones that I picked but that would be just a little too easy and would have made way too much sense. Those are 2 things that sometimes I just shy away from....easy and sense. Today I went through and dug, sliced, snipped, clipped and plucked out all of the bulb rot I could find and weeded out the worst of the irises. I then went into the backyard where I have lots of different varieties and colors of irises and thinned out several areas back there before the diseases started on them. I must have planted 25 or so new iris clumps in the front garden. After the job was done, I looked over my handywork and came to the conclusion that I probably put in more iris clumps in that front garden than I took out. This is not a good thing because irises multiply as time goes by and they create more bulbs. This will once again lead to the over crowding and a hightened possibilty of disease amongst my iris population. Hopefully the new iris clumps will take at least a couple of years to multiply before they start crying out my name again, requesting some relief and attention. Hey...at least I should have a bunch of flowers in there over the next couple of seasons and a lot more variety in colors too.