Step One: deciding what Step One should be

When you have as much enthusiasm for iris as we do, it’s easy to find yourself spending, say, two or three hours shopping for iris online. It’s also easy to click “add to cart” a shocking number of times in that duration. And, well, the shipping season for iris rhizomes is over in mere days, so for our new venture it would seem like choosing the iris for our first year of growing should happen right away. Top priority. An urgent, must-do task of immediate importance. So, I figure that should be Step One.

And let me assure you, it is so easy to shop for iris when you love them. And having a reason to buy more than you already have, well, that is a bit of a dream come true. But choosing carefully, and trying to buy for purposes beyond “Ooooooh, pretty!” means slowing down, methodically selecting for attributes and qualities outside of one’s personal preferences, and ensuring I don’t purchase iris Chris already has and vice-versa... it puts the brakes on the runaway shopping spree aspect of populating our first beds. So it slows down our Step One a touch.

And then, well, the beds aren’t ready for this imminent shipment of rhizomes, so certainly that needs to be a top priority, and should get done quickly, if not sooner. Which means we need to find someone to bring in high-quality soil, as our native soil is, um, well “poor” is the nice way to say it (more on our native soil below). So finding someone to truck in really good planting soil is high up on the to-do list, and needs to be put first on the list of accomplishments for today.

Of course before the beds go in we need to decide on the layout and which kind of watering system we’ll be using so those will be ready before the soil arrives, making that the thing we ought to start with right now, maybe even yesterday. Definitely, we need that done as the initial step.

Right after we buy all the parts for the drip and soakers, which we can’t really do until we’ve finalized the layout, which will depend on how many iris we buy, and is also somewhat determined by which iris we buy since some of the layout of the beds will undoubtedly be dictated by the types and colors of iris in our purchase... So, we really ought to get that done first.

Step One, for sure, should be the uh, the um... what did we just decide? [Re-traces steps, notices circular logic....]

Well, it looks like shopping for iris wins this round! Once the order is in, we can move on to the next step of laying out the beds, designing the watering system, and having some gorgeous, healthy dirt brought in. Clearly, there is a logical, obvious order to this. [Cue the audience to laugh now.]

Truth be told, though, it is tremendous fun to shop for iris, and shopping with this project in mind is quite different than iris shopping for myself. Normally, I choose them using the “Oooooh” factor, which is to say, if the photo makes me say “Ooooooh” out loud, I add it to my wish list. And I have a style and variety of iris that I like for my personal garden, which is apparent during bloom season.

So I had my first ‘pay attention’ moment when I went online to begin the shopping. As I looked through the zillion or so photos, I had to use criteria beyond “I find that just lovely, must have it” and I think I did a good job of choosing iris that represent a variety of tastes. I chose different sizes, different colors, different shapes, and different bloom times for all of them. And of the 40 or so that I initially chose, only two of them were iris Chris had already purchased. Our beds should be varied and interesting, which I’m quite pleased about.

So today I will go online again, finalize that purchase, and complete Step One of our comedy of iris.
Then I need to find good soil and amendments for delivery, that is definitely next, right? I thought this step would be easy, but it turns out, not so much...

We are located in central California, in a largely agricultural area, which means we have a nice amount of space to start with (about an acre of open, slightly sloped land), but also some significant challenges.
First, our native soil is dreadful. It has two textures:
1. pudding, in the rain; and
2. concrete, the rest of the year.

This is how it looks right now, before any clean up or treatment. Consider this the “before” picture.

And the nutrient level is very low. It wants basically everything added to it for any growing purposes, so trucking in good soil and amendments is a necessity. I thought being in an agricultural area would mean it’s easy to find good planting soil, what with so many growers around us, but that hasn’t been the case. We don’t require thousands of acres of amendment, making us too puny for the local suppliers’ services. And yet, buying dozens and dozens of bags of amendment at a nursery is neither economically nor practically feasible. So accomplishing this task will require more digging (har har).

Second, that hard ground is home to several kinds of critters that love it when we water—it makes the soil soft for them to dig through, and gives them something tasty and nutritious to eat. I, personally, do not like killing critters when they are in their territory, but no amount of reasonable conversation makes ground squirrels understand that they should go around the foundations of your barn when tunneling across your property. And gophers don’t care that the plant they just destroyed was a gift from your recently deceased mother... it was moist and tasty! Basically, any time you add water to our land, you attract the very vermin you want nowhere near your precious plants. Ugh.

Third, it gets very hot here, and it’s quite dry. Because this is basically an irrigated desert, and for weeks at time it’s over 100 degrees—so, really hot. Baking hot. Viciously burning your skin all day long kind of hot. Which means there are hours of the day, and days of the year, where working outside just isn’t fun or easy. Plus scheduling around our pesky day jobs means working really early, really late, and often really sweaty. At least it also means we can spend the hottest hours indoors, so please don’t think I’m whining. It is just another challenge, to work around the “Tarzan hot” hours and still accomplish something.

And managing the watering (which requires more care during a drought) is also critical. Iris don’t like to be too wet (or they rot), and managing their moisture and nutrients is crucial for them to propagate and increase. But, creating moisture means attracting critters that will eat their roots, if not the entire rhizome... wheeee?

So, even after we get good soil brought in, we have some challenges in keeping critters out of the beds, and not losing our stock to nibblers, heat, or rot. Time for some creative solutions.

When I was gardening back in my suburban setting, the soil was decent, critters were few, and the water was a spigot away... it was easy. All I had to do was not overwater, and feed once or twice a year, and I had gorgeous, happy iris all the time. After moving here, with the more challenging conditions, I have tried a variety of solutions, after losing most of a bed of named iris to a ground squirrel.

When I first planted iris in our country soil, they did so-so. I didn’t initially know how to manage the soil moisture and feeding was completely different here. But once I got it figured out, I saw lots of green growth, and happily awaited my first blooms. But they never came, and the number of rhizomes seemed to dwindle. Finally, a bit of loose soil at the back of the bed exposed the dirty truth: a ground squirrel had tunneled into the bed, from under my barn. He had been snacking on my lovely iris from beneath, and I hadn’t noticed him for weeks. This is where it started to get a little Caddy Shack...

I took up the few remaining iris, and dug out the entire bed to a depth of about one foot. I moulded tight-weave chicken wire into an open-shoe box shape, and laid it into the hole where the bed had been. I then re-filled the bed, and planted a new batch of rhizomes, confident I had outsmarted the little blighter. Joke was on me, though. Several weeks later, as I was watering, I noticed a bump of loose dirt near the outside edge of the bed, and the dirt was moving slightly.

“Ha!” I thought triumphantly to myself. “He’s just run into my chicken wire basket, and can’t tunnel his way through it!” I quietly laid down the hose, and watched to see what would happen. The little guy pushed the dirt out of the tunnel and popped his head above ground. I could see him looking around, so I held perfectly still. He ducked in again for a moment, then came up again, and to my outrage and astonishment, he got out of his tunnel, walked over the lip of the chicken wire barrier, and began to tunnel down into the bed, right in front of me!

The hours spent digging out the bed, making the chicken wire barrier, placing it in so carefully, and replanting the whole bed was undone in one moment, when the ground squirrel hit the barrier, and decided to just go over it. I had been played by a ground squirrel!

All bets were off after that. I dug up the remaining rhizomes from that bed and moved them into pots. I never liked that as a solution, nor did my plants. Then I struck on using pallets as beds, which did a good job, once I got the soil combination right. I placed the pallets on rocky ground, where the squirrels don’t really dig, and then filled all the slats with a combination of native soil, amendments, and planting mix. And it had the added advantage of making it simple to keep iris from one bed or section from creeping into another section. I kept only one kind of iris in each pallet, and there was never any confusion.

An ongoing problem was keeping the soil moist enough, but it was better than the problem of keeping them from being squirrel food. The other problem was that the run-off water encouraged insects, and made a lovely crop of weeds, but those will always be problems out here, so I soldiered on.

We are considering several different solutions for beds in this new venture, and it will be a trial and error experience. Currently the strong options are raised beds, pallets, kiddie pools, and beds directly on the slope. Chris has a variety of large pots she is successfully growing in at her place, so I wouldn’t be surprised if those get put into play here, too. Year one will definitely be the year of “try it and see” and that’s kind of my favorite part of this adventure. Right behind the “choosing which iris we’ll grow” part of this adventure.

Now, if you will excuse me, I have some iris shopping I need to finalize.

As promised, an iris! This is Pink Kitten
Blue shade of pink, lined deeper on F.; tangerine beard tipped lighter. 69-2: (New Frontier x Signature) X Dove WingsHybridizer & Year of Introduction - V. Wood, 1977Classification - Intermediate BeardedBloom Period - Early and rebloomingBloom Height - 20"