Gardeners love perennials because they grow so quickly.
These offer beauty at an inexpensive price.
However, they multiply quickly and grow out of control, clumping and even taking over other planted areas. If you want to prevent this from happening, there comes a time when you must divide perennials in your garden.
If you don’t divide these, they will eventually look ill-kept. Even so, there are other reasons you want to separate them eventually.
Avoid Holes
Perennials overgrow, and they usually begin to clump together. When these clumps aren’t divided every three to four years, then spots often die out, leaving gaping holes.
Protect from Fungal Disease
Large clumps of perennial roots are susceptible to insect infestations and fungal infections.
Flowers
When you don’t divide perennials and multiply, these become overcrowded and have fewer or smaller flowers than those that are well spaced.
If you replant in different areas, you control the plants, especially when the plants are aggressive and tend to overwhelm neighboring plants.
More Plants
Besides, when you divide the perennials, you create more plants of the same variety. That offers an inexpensive way of adding new plants to other garden areas.
When to Dig Up and Separate
Many gardeners ask themselves when to dig up and separate perennials. These are solid plans, so you can dig them up to replant in different areas any time from Spring to Fall. However, two seasons are best for doing this; spring and fall. These seasons are colder than the summer, so the weather and soil conditions are less stressful for the plant. Just be sure to divide them when the plants are large enough.
Bottom Line
Perennials are beautiful and very easy to grow. However, they take some maintenance, and you need to dig them up and separate them every couple of years. That is a natural process, but one you should do in the colder months of spring or fall. Remember, separating allows you to plant small clumps of plants in different areas of the garden.
There are tips for those going through this situation who need to know what to do if they are in a drought.
Yes, it’s ok to water your plants even if you are in the middle of a drought. What you do is water your plants once a week or once every other week. An inch of water per week should be enough to care for your plants.
Applying mulch also helps. Now, we usually tell you to use mulch during the winter months to keep the soil warm; it also keeps the soil moist during drought.
Applying two to three inches of soil keeps the soil cool and helps keeps the sun directly off the plants. It also helps if you water the mulch too before putting it around your plants.
Stop fertilizing your plants. Although fertilizing is supposed to help grow your plants, in this case, it may ruin them. Fertilizer has salt, and if the salt builds up in the soil because it is not naturally leaching out with water, it can build up over time and burn the roots.
Under normal circumstances, fertilizing is the right thing to do, but it’s best to follow these instructions rather than take an unnecessary chance in this situation.
Weeds are never a good thing, especially during a drought. Then that if you have weeds, pull them. Weeds rob plants and flowers of their moisture, which they desperately need during this time.
Deadheading your flowers is removing spent blooms before they have a chance to set seed and zap the energy of your other plants or flowers because they will need more water to grow.
What California is going through right now is a horrible situation. Going through a drought and being told you might have to let your gardens, plants, flowers, and grass die to save water cannot be easy, especially if you are a gardener.
These tips are easier said than done in most cases. But if you find yourself in a situation where you are in the middle of drought conditions, it’s best to take the advice and do what you can to save your garden.
I don’t know if these tips can help you, especially if you live in a state where you have had drought conditions for the last five years.
But if you live in a state or a region of the country with shorter drought conditions, these helpful tips should get you through it.
Source of Information on Dividing Perennial Plants
https://www.tnnursery.net
