The Crafty Cultivator

I want to attempt to keep these delphiniums forever. They were one of the very first things I planted at our home here, and I want to keep them for our forever home. They are such a deep and beautiful blue, and just bring me so much joy. I have no idea what cultivar they are, but they are one of my favorites. The photo above is a short flower spike, after cutting back the whole plant as a battle tactic against the delphinium worms (I’ll try and get an updated post about that situation later this spring), but in a good year they get around 5 feet tall. So, I am moving them to my dad’s house to keep them safe while we wait to get some stability back into our life.

Spring is a good time to move things like this. I like to move and divide at this point in spring, when everything has started to pop up, but doesn’t yet have a big bunch of leaf cover to support through the stress and trauma of dividing & moving them.

The scale of the root photo below doesn’t translate great, but the mass of roots was around 18″ deep , and close to 12″ wide. I had worked around the root ball with my garden fork to help loosen everything up, but needed to get the long skinny shovel we have to get deep enough to get the whole root ball without tearing all the roots apart in the process.

One I had dug up the clump and realized it was a much larger than I had thought, I decided to also divide it. I only cut it in half, but could have easily divided it into at least 4 sections and still have decent sized plants.

I placed the divided clumps into 3 gallon pots, and topped up with old potting soil from my pots I grow tomatoes in (since I use new soil every year if I can manage it). This will keep the roots covered and happy until they get to their new home. My little helper helped me water them into the pots later in the afternoon.

About a week after I initially dug and divided these, I got a chance to go visit my Dad and get them planted in their new homes. Check out the growth change in just a couple days between the photos above and below this part of the post.

I still have quite a lot of work to battle back the grass that has started to infiltrate the garden bed over the last few years of being unable to keep up while focusing on tough, real life stuff.

The other delphinium I already have at my Dad’s (was labeled as a Genevieve, but I think it might have been mislabeled) is also going to need dividing soon. It has grass growing in the clump too, so that might be a project for next Spring as I won’t be able to get to it until it has far too much growth happening , and I don’t want to stress it while it is actively growing. I add this to this post mostly as a reminder to myself next spring to get that poor delphinium divided and clear the grass out of its clumps.