Tips for Dividing Perennials in Transplanting

Video Transcript

"I have a couple of tools here that might not be like the most proper garden tool, but they're practical and they work well. There's some handy little tree swords, tree knife saws that you can get to cut perennials, but I just take a regular old wood saw or a regular old bread knife. I'm going to insert it into the crown. I'm going to use this big one first because it's such a big plant. I can get a number of plants out of this. I’m actually going to down into the crown of the iris and I'm just going to start sawing back and forth. We've watered the plant, we've trimmed it back, we've done everything that we need to do to help reduce the shock of the plant. I'm just going to keep going back and forth in a sawing motion and I'm going to get this iris plant here cut in half and really get a good look at the root system once it's cut. Be sure to keep your hands out of the way of the saw. Once we get that sliced, it should fairly easily break in half. Now, you can see we have a lot of extra soil on this plant that we might not need. Just to make it a little bit easier, I'm going to take my handy little bread knife here and I'm just going to shave away some of the soil matter that I don't really feel that I need. Sometimes root pruning is good to instimulate new growth and actually cut away some of the old root and expose some of the new hair."