Re: CULT: BEGINNER STILL - DWARF/DUTCH IRIS HELP NEEDED

In a message dated 10/12/01 9:57:08 AM Eastern Daylight Time, 
hederst@zeuter.com writes:

>  Lots of people talk about putting iris in pots.  I am not familiar 
>  with this practice.  Why do you do it?  You plant in pots and then 
>  put the pots in the ground.  Why?     Could I put these 
>  little "bulbs" in pots and store them in a cool/dark place through 
>  the winter, and then put them out first thing in spring?  

There are lots of reasons to put iris in pots.  Sometimes, like with the 
arils (which come from the desert middle east), they need an alkaline ph, and 
your garden is acid.  It's easier to make one pot alkaline than a whole 
garden.  And they don't like lots of rain and humidity at some times of year, 
and it's easier to keep them dry if you can just move the whole pot.

Sometimes you want to have an iris to bloom for a winter show and you 'force' 
it like you do with daffodils or narcissus.  Sometimes, as someone said, you 
don't have the beds ready.  Sometimes you don't get time to plant before it 
gets cold.  Sometimes you just want to take a little more care with that 
particular iris.  Sometimes you want to move the iris from a sunny but 
unprotected from the wind spot to a protected spot for the winter, or out of 
the broiling sun in the summer.  Like I said - lots of reasons.

The reason one puts the pot in the ground is that an exposed pot will freeze 
more readily than one in the ground.

I'm pretty sure that the bulbous iris don't need to be put in pots.  I'm 
tending to say that they are like daffodils and crocuses which need cold to 
flower, but I'm not sure about that.  If you get iris at Mother's Day, 
usually it is the larger bulbous iris (Dutch, English and Spanish) which the 
florists probably force.

There are actually 3 distinct types of iris - those that grow from bulbs, 
those that grow from rhizomes and have beards, and those that just have roots 
like the Siberians and the Japanese and a lot of the species iris.  But they 
are all iris.  Most folks, unless they say otherwise, are talking about 
bearded iris when they say iris.

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