Re: HYB:CULT:water and seedlings

Yes Betty, one has to compromise in such warm AND wet conditions!
To water or not to water? THAT is our motto!
Let's make the Australians dream a bit...about our wet conditions...
My problem is when I have to decide whether i should be watering or not. Because even if last August it was wet, there are times when the place looks wet, superficially, but if you scratch a bit you realise it is VERY dry. Then i SOAK them, i let the hoose on during the WHOLE whole night. (yes, we can do this over here, ground water is 2 metres down!) They would have been wet anyway with the dew, so now they are wet deep in the roots. 
It seems to work.
Here, we're just at the point where the Rhein splits in two and starts to make the delta known as The Netherlands. One arm of the river passes us 3km north, and the other is 500m close and circles the village on the east and south. 
You can't imagine the condensation it gives.
You start to feel the dew already in the evening and in the morning the place is SOAKED. It sometimes doesn't get dry in between. It feels like the tropics, in a cooler version of course, this is not Louisiana, and it can freeze very hard in the winter!
The irises HATE it! The whole plot looks completely brown with leafspot, but most of them survive. The ones who don't, i call them the Tourists, they don't deserve to stay!
I had to pot many sdlgs last year because the new beds weren't ready and the sdlgs were getting too crowed in their small pots.( I don't want to do that ever again, what a work!) But all these plants loved the loose soil, even if i had to water them twice a day sometimes.
For the ones i replanted directly in their definitive beds, made of 99% of clay no matter what i add to it, they had a harder time with 3 weeks of solid rain in August combined with the dew. But the losses were among specific crosses, it was not an overall loss. So i think only the unfit disapeared. It saves a lot of heartbreaking decisions when you have to decide between the ones that can stay and the ones that deserve a quick reincarnation on the compost heap. At least, a lot of the latter have already gone! 

Thanks to you all for your mails, the wet ones as well as the dry ones
It's great to see our world from so many differntpoints of view, without even leaving our own single little plots of earth in which we have deep long roots. 

Loic



----------------------------------------------
Loic TASQUIER     zone 6 - Nederland
Email : tasquierloic@cs.com



sfear the repotting when the sdlgs get too crowded
----- Original Message ----- From: <Autmirislvr@aol.com> 
To: <iris@hort.net>
Sent: Friday, December 01, 2006 4:47 AM
Subject: [iris]HYB:CULT:water and seedlings



In a message dated 11/30/2006 4:32:56 P.M. Central Standard Time,
janclarx@hotmail.com writes:

.  <<Now if I watered my seedlings faithfully with the soaker hose here, I
would be kissing most of them goodbye too!>>

Jan,
I'm zone 6 and the years vary almost as much as colors on the irises! Our summers are both hot and humid. This summer there were many days in the upper 90's. KY is extremely humid and we often have cloud cover with the humidity 
and heat.  We also have heavy fog and dew.
With our weather conditions, my seedlings need to be able to take a decent amount of rain. And the alternating dry spell. Small seedlings just can't 
tolerate the extremes a larger, more established rhizome  can handle.  My
experience indicate that most full grown rhizomes can tolerate dry or drought 
conditions better than they can tolerate the wet  conditions.

In this post I was talking about seedling that sprouted this past  spring.
They sprout in late March or early April here and I try to get them in the ground by the end of May (end of TB season). When I accomplish this goal, I 
usually get a high percent of first year bloom.
There were several hundred seedlings and I work alone. I wouldn't have time 
to fill that many pots.  The trick is to get the roots  established before
the sun's rays become bleaching hot. Traditionally, I water them until they 
have established root systems.

We had a hot spell not long after these were planted and the ground became
excessively dry for a couple of weeks. A DEEP soak is required to encourage 
roots.  Ordinarily, I soak every 10 days to two week IF  needed.  With the
weather so dry, and the seedlings so young, I was watering any time the surface looked powdery dry across the bed, but only very early in the morning and a deep soak when I did water. I've read that water on the foliage when the temps pass 90 degrees can almost boil the little ones, and create leaf spot on the 
survivors.
Many of the losses came later in the season, once most were established and 
doing well.  By this time, I'd turned them over to mother nature.

This procedure has worked in the two previous seasons.  In  addition, only
some crosses were effected in this manner. Other crosses, sprinkled throughout 
the bed did well.  To me, this speaks more to specific  crosses.
When working with pots, it's good to water from the bottom up when possible. Shallow fill pails etc. with water and sit the pots IN the pails until the water soaks to the top of the soil. It insures the roots are watered well without getting the tops wet. It works best with mum transplants etc., but 
I've also seen it work with irises.
If things go bad, I may pot 50-100 of the new batch (2816 seed) in pots this 
spring.  Hope not.



________________________________________________________
Betty W.  in South-central KY Zone 6 ---
Bridge In Time Iris Garden@website:
Where  the seeds are in the pots once again!
_www.thegardensite.com/irises/bridgeintime/_ (http://www.thegardensite.com
/irises/bridgeintime/)
_Reblooming Iris - Home Page_ (http://www.rebloomingiris.com/)
_iris-photos archives_ (http://www.hort.net/lists/iris-photos/)
_iris-talk archives_ (http://www.hort.net/lists/iris-talk/)
_AIS: American Iris Society website_ (http://www.irises.org/)

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