Re: Iris beds
From: celia storey <storey@aristotle.net>
>I also have a question about the day I read someone puts
>manure in their beds. I read somewhere that you weren't
>suppose to use manure with TB because it causes disease
>and rot in some cases. Any advise?
Our local answer guy insists that high nitrogen tends to favor the
development of that mustard-seed fungus we've been discussing here of late.
Some of the old Iris-L'ers told us how they put well-rotted manure in a low
layer of their beds, so it doesn't contact the rhizome and so the roots
have to burrow down to find it.
>Also, because of the
>amount of clay in our soil, I mixed peat moss with it in the
>last (only iris) bed that we made. i may have put too much
>in because now that we've hit the height of drought season,
>the leaf tops are yellowing/browning.
Tip browning is normal in dormant TBs. If it bugs you, you can trim the
leaves, but then you'll eventually have thin brown lines along the cuts,
which you'll feel compelled to remove, too. I think browning, while an
unhappy event caused by the plant's inability to move water up to the leaf
tip, is by happy accident, a protective factor that reduces the amount of
stored water lost to evaporation during times of water stress. (For an
interesting discussion of evaporative plant "pumps" see Steven Vogel's new
pop-science book "Cats' Paws and Catapults.")
In other words, you're not doing anything wrong.
>By the way, do your cats just stay indoors? I have trouble
>keeping the neighbors cats (mine stay indoors) out of my
>freshly dug/mulched iris beds, any suggestions?
>
Oh, Becky. Look in the archives under "cats." Such a wealth of comment and
humor and ideas and exasperation you will find there!
celia
s*@aristotle.net
Little Rock, Arkansas, USDA Zone 7b
-----------------------------------
257 feet above sea level,
average rainfall about 50 inches (more than 60" in '97)
average relative humidity (at 6 a.m.) 84%.
moderate winters, hot summers ... but lots of seesaw action in all seasons
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