Snow cover is good for irises here in the north.

Mine all snuggled cozy in their beds.

I wish my beds were that well protected. This entire month has been brutally cold here, but we only have a couple of inches of snow cover. I don't know if that thin blanket is enough to protect my iris beds. I may have heavy losses this year. Time will tell.

Laurie

I was worried about my flowerbeds in November, December & early January--too warm with daffodils peeking thru + new growth on my iris. This exteme cold below zero weather & 12 inches of snow has solved that problem. Nothing peeking out now!

Oh Laurie, that's tough. Hopefully there won't be too many losses. What was your lowest temp? So far ours has been -3. They changed our zone to 6a, which makes sense since we have not had any temps below -6 in many, many years. We used to have winters with -20 to -25. But always significant snow cover. Supposedly our area has the most snow on a regular basis east of Denver. And luckily we're on sand, so when the snow melts water doesn't sit. Except on our roadway, where its gravel and we have a real mess in the spring.

How cold have you been Wanda? 12 inches of snow is a nice insulator. 6 feet on the other hand.....Places about 30 miles from us got about 11 feet. And this was just in the last snowfall, we already had about 3 feet.

We had been -18 one night last week. How my daughters' cars started the next morning in their apartment lots was a miracle to me. I don't want to see our heating bill for February.

We got down to -25 at the coldest and mostly stayed below zero for a couple of weeks. We often have minimal snow cover up here. I'm not sure why. They almost always have a lot more snow a couple of hundreds miles south down in Minneapolis.

There were two consecutive winters a few years back when we had frigid temps with even less snow cover than we have now, and the garden losses were huge. I lost about 150 iris cvs each of those winters. It'll be interesting to see how the iris beds come out of this winter. If they do well, that will demonstrate that they only need an inch or two of insulation to help them through sub-zero temps. If not, I'll have plenty of room to try new irises this year.

Laurie

Now that's the attitude! More room to plant.

Most catalogues list tall bearded iris hardy to Z3,
which is -40 to-30 average low. That apparently is not the case then?





This message was edited Feb 18, 2007 10:14 AM

TBs and BBs are by far and away the wimpiest of the bearded classes in my garden. Probably 95% of the approx. 300 cvs I lost over those two horrible winters were TBs. That's why I no longer purchase them. I do still occasionally add them to the beds from trades and gifts, but I don't waste money on them anymore. For every one TB that has managed to successfully acclimate and survive in my growing conditions over the last decade, I have probably lost another five. The ones that are still alive and kicking (I'm still growing 236 TBs) are the toughest of the tough.

The dwarf and median beardeds (exclusive of BBs) and various beardless types (Sib, versicolor, pseud, JI) do much better here.

Laurie

That's interesting. I am zone 4a and dangerously close to zone 3b. I very seldom lose an iris or daylily during the winter. We usually have some snow cover though, so maybe that helps. Right now we only have about 3 inches on the ground. This year we didn't have snow cover until a couple weeks ago and it was bitter cold. I'll be interested to see if I have any losses come spring.

I should amend my comments a bit. The large losses I experienced as a result of those two frigid, snowless winters didn't necessarily occur during the winter months. I lost many irises throughout the growing seasons immediately following those winters. I attributed those losses to the extreme stress those plants underwent during the winters and the weakened states in which they entered the following springs.

Another iris-lethal aspect of a frigid, snowless winter is the impact it has on spring thaw. Those specific winter conditions result in soil which freezes to great depth. If spring temps rise rapidly, as they did those same years, the surface soil thaws quickly, but the subsoil remains frozen. Water in the surface soil has nowhere to go, so it pools around the rhizomes and rots them before the subsoil has a chance to thaw and absorb the extra moisture. Since I garden in heavy clay, the moisture-holding effect is magnified to fatal levels.

After those two years of disastrous losses, I changed the way I plant bearded irises. I started planting them on top of raised windrows to improve drainage and try to negate the effect of surface soil thaw with subsoil freeze. I have had very few losses in my iris beds since switching to that planting method. Then again, we haven't experienced another snowless, frigid winter since then, either.

Like I said, it'll be very interesting to see how the irises come out of this winter.

Laurie

That makes sense. I think the biggest difference between your conditions and mine isn't so much the temperatures and snow cover as it is the soil. Ours is very sandy and drains away very quickly. Almost too quickly.

I envy anyone who gardens on sandy soil. I know sand presents its own challenges, but I'd so much prefer to be able to pull weeds and plant irises without a pickaxe (kidding ... sort of)!

Very interesting thread, you two. From it I have learned quite a bit about what irises need. We don't have the extremes of temperature that you have, but it is interesting what a difference snow plays in clay soil. I am impressed that you all keep trying. Laurief, anything you recommend I will take to heart as a real survivor. Your info really helps the rest of us, though it may not seem so when your irises are croaking.

LOL! Thing is, croaking irises have never done anything but inspire me to grow more of the doggone things. I'm tenacious if not foolishly impulisive. The very first year I decided I wanted to grow irises, I came online and traded for about 50 different cultivars - mostly unknown TBs. I had never gardened before and figured it was one of those intuitive skills that one doesn't actually have to learn. As a result, I lost all but 3 of those first 50+ irises within the first year. Duh!

But I WANTED to grow irises! So I spent the next year reading everything I could get my hands on to learn about irises. Then I started trading again. Much better results the second time around, but I did keep losing a fair number of irises. It didn't take long for me to realize that losing irises was an inevitable part of the learning process ... and probably an inevitable part of growing irises in northern Minnesota. More reading, more querying of knowledgeable iris folks, more experimenting.

Needless to say, I've learned a lot along the way about what does and doesn't work for irises in my own garden. It doesn't bother me a bit to lose irises. It does bother me if I can't figure out a reasonable explanation for why it happened, though. My goal, which I've pretty much achieved now, is to establish a nice collection of various types of irises that are tough enough to handle my very difficult growing conditions without coddling.

I'm a lazy gardener, and I'm unwilling to deal with plants that require constant care in order to survive (much less thrive). If an iris is weak and struggles here, it is more than welcome to die. I don't treat for rot, I rarely move an iris to a different part of the garden to see if it prefers one spot over another, I don't mulch in the winter, and I don't replace irises that die (unless the replacements are given to me as a gift). With approx. 60,000 registered irises on the books, I don't need to waste my time growing weak irises when there are so many others I can try.

My irises are a lot like me - not necessarily the youngest and most gorgeous; but tough, tenacious, and well tested by life. ;-)

Laurie

Oh Laurie,
What a testimonial....as I look out my IL window with the snow piled high on all of my iris purchases from last summer. My outlook is somewhat the same...I am looking forward to see what will survive this winter cold and what I will be able to play with this summer. I've learned alot from reading all of your threads here so thank you. Hopefully we will have some nice pics to share at the end of summer. :)
Laura

I appreciate your testimonial as well. It makes me feel extra lucky to live here in Northern New Mexico. I have lost very few irises here and most of the losses came from criminal neglect on my part. Mine don't always bloom the first year I get them, but they usually bloom eventually. We have little iris rot and few iris borers. It is dry and sunny here, a close to perfect environment for TB's and many others. But I won't even attempt the Pacific and Japanese ones. I do plan to try some LA Iris because I hear they can adapt to dryer situations. I will plant them near the drip line of my roof or near a water spiggot.

I would assume that most beardless irises would struggle in a hot, dry climate like NM, but never having tried to grow anything in such a climate, I could be totally wrong about that. I've never tried any PCI and have only tried one or two LA, both of which died. I do grow a few JI in pots, and they seem to handle my climate without undue stress. They aren't big on the practice of blooming for me, though.

You say you have "few" iris borers? From everything I've read, you shouldn't have ANY iris borers in NM. If you do, that certainly doesn't bode well for the southern tier of states.

I typically only get 20-30% bloom on first year irises in my garden. I'm not sure whether that's because of my very short growing season or because it takes irises from warmer areas so long to shrink down and acclimate here. Most likely it's both. That's not really a bad thing, though. I can buy irises one year and look forward to maiden bloom from them over the next several years.

LOL. Seems like I've figured out ways to look on the bright side of all of the challenges of growing irises up here ... all except the mosquitos, horseflies, and deerflies, that is. Even the concrete clay gives me a good cardio vascular workout. ;-)

Laurie

So far I only have bearded iris, but I really want to try LA Iris. I grew up in Louisiana and my mother always told me that it was really hard to grow Louisiana iris in yards. I planted some in a boggy area in my yard and they grew fine.
I almost fainted when I heard they would grow in dry places and didn't especially need a bog. I determined that I had to try right away to grow some. They are beautiful and I hate it when I am told I can't do something.
So I will try some this next fall. I will plant them in the drip line of my roof, in hopes that they will feel at home.
I understand siberians and arilbred do well here and plan to try them.
I have not seen iris borer, but I don't assume they aren't around just because I haven't seen them. I gather you know more about iris borer than I do.
Glad to hear I am not the only one who doesn't get lots of blooms the first year. I had no way of knowing how many other people got. It usually takes me 3 years to get blooms, but not always. I planted a lot of iris last year. I am hoping I don't have to wait three years to see blooms on the new ones.
My weather is ideal for some iris. I don't plan to try the ones which need a lot of water!

I've never read that LAs can grow in dry conditions, but then I've never paid much attention to them since I haven't developed an interest in them yet. I do hope you have success with them.

You should do very well with ABs and perhaps even with arils. I adore the exotic look of the arils and ABs. I haven't dared try any arils, and I've lost more ABs than I've managed to keep alive so far. I'm still working on trying to figure out how to keep ABs happy here.

Sibs can adapt to drier conditions once they're well established, but you may find you have to water them daily for the first few months. You may also find that they perform best when you water them regularly even after they've established themselves in your garden.

I'm relieved that you've never seen a borer down there, and I doubt if you ever will. They are a pest of the Midwest and East Coast. You don't have them down south, from what I've read.

If you typically purchase irises from warm winter areas where rhizomes grow to gargantuan sizes, you're probably running into the same problem I have with minimal first year bloom. It takes a good long while for those big, warm climate lunkers to shrink down and acclimate to northern MN. You may get the quickest bloom out of rhizomes purchased from a climate as similar to your own as possible.

Laurie

I agree. The big honkers sent to me from warmer climates take a few years to get used to Iowa's weather extremes. Some just simply rot away. I had a few surprises show up Spring of 2006 that I thought were long dead.

It's kind of fun to see an iris pop up that you thought was long gone, though, isn't it, Wanda? I've been surprised twice now by irises that bloomed where they had never been planted. In my case, they weren't irises that I had presumed dead, though. They were just irises that showed up in odd spots in the garden. It took me way too long to figure out that the deer had moved them!

Laurie

Very interesting thread if I do say so myself, LOL--considering I've contributed nothing to it. Very informative. Thanks everyone.

Laurie, I never thought about the iris dying later on might be from the winter stress, makes sense though.

Sandy soil has it's drawbacks, you need to water, and fertilize a lot more. Because of the size of my beds, it would be impossible to amend them. However, over the years from the plant material dying back, leaves from the trees, and mulch the soil does get amended from the top down. I have a seperate well for my plants, and often water daily, which, luckily I don't mind. I have a couple of water towers I move around each day. When it's 90 degrees and the soils sandy it's necessary if you want to grow all but the arid type plants.

We,ll, I had a bumper crop this spring including an iris that hitch-hiked to my house in a Tazzy clump. She had to go back 8 years to see when Mulberry Snow had last bloomed in her yard!

Those two are gorgeous together.

What type of soil conditions do you have Wanda?

Just a follow-up for Wanda - her beds are just too beautiful for words! We've now had two days in the 30's, and much of the snow is melted - by the end of the week it'll probably be all gone. Just today I could see many of ones I planted last fall (Wanda was SO kind and gave me most of them), and they are GREEN at the bottom - Yay! Don't know if they'll bloom this year, but as a newbie it's great to know I didn't just kill them right off - I followed Wanda's advice - you can't go wrong with that - Dax

We don't get much snow here in Middle Tennessee. We did get some last week though. It has melted and I've been spending hours pushing rhizomes back down into the soil. This summer and fall I moved and replanted all of them and now the soft loamy soil keeps washing away from the rhizomes. Luckily for me they are tough little campers. I've only lost a very few. Trying to keep on top of it now so I don't loose any more of them.

I'm excited to see the new seedlings are germinating now too!

My soil is alot of clay with some real dirt here and there. I keep mulching & mulching my beds in the hope that the clay will loosen up a bit. I plant my iris clumps on raised mounds to improve the drainage. The iris seem to like it.