All the Dirt on Gardening

Plants multiply by making seed, spreading their roots, adding rhizomes and multiplying bulbs. One way to tell if a lily or daffodil needs to be divided is that it has fewer flowers or seems to be healthy only around the outer edges of a clump. Lilies are very good at making copies of themselves. Toward the end of the flowering season there are tiny lily seeds all along the stem and when the bulbs are dug up, there will be more bulbs under-ground than were originally planted. In addition, between the bulb in the ground and the surface of the soil, stem bulblets will be growing along the underground stem. Now that lilies have bloomed and faded, we can dig up the bulbs and divide them to share or to re-plant. There are a few common methods you can use. After digging, remove the roots of the bulb, being careful to not cut into the basal plate. The basal plate looks like the bottom of an onion and bulb scales are like layers of an onion. Any bulbils and bulblets in the soil...