Hi! I am Mitch Baker with American Plant in Bethesda, Maryland. We’re talking about winterizing your ornamental garden and right now, transplanting is the topic.

Fall is a great time to bring new plants into the garden but it’s also a great time to move things around in the garden and that’s one of the beauties of perennials. Perennials are easily dug up and divided and you can fill in their spots in your garden or dig a perennial up, divide it and give a portion away to a friend or a neighbor. So perennials are terrific in the garden and this is a great time to divide them.

So we’ll start with this fern, first I’m going to cut it back so I can see what I’m working with and make digging up a little easier. So we’ll just take the top out of it and again we’re just taking a portion of this fern out of the ground and we’re going to leave a portion behind. So now I can see the profile here. Now go ahead and dig this portion out then we can split that in half, we will put half right back in the ground here so that it has an opportunity to redevelop for three to five years before we may want to divide it again.

Now rather than just place this fern back in the ground, this is our opportunity to improve the soil by adding a composted soil amendment. So we’re going to incorporate some of this composted soil amendment or some of your own compost if you have it, if not, if you’re going to buy something, buy a composted soil amendment. So that you add additional biology and humic matter to the soil, this maybe the only opportunity, certainly the best opportunity we have to improve the soil. So we will go ahead and work some of that composted soil amendment into this planting site as we put the fern back in the ground.

All right, we have easily dug up the fern that was here, we divided it; we put half of it back in the soil after we amended the soil with some compost or a composted soil amendment. Now, we’re left with a generous portion to place somewhere else in the garden or to give to a friend or neighbor. And this can be done with most perennials this time of year. You can dig them up, move them around or dig them up and divide them and put half back in the soil. This is the great thing about perennials; they are very easy to work with this time of year.

So, that gets us to where we need to be with transplanting. Next up, we will talk about bringing those houseplants in for the winter.