Hi and welcome back to Garden Ninja.
Today I'm going to be showing you how you can propagate your own plants by division.
What that means is you can split the plants you have already got into smaller parts and
replant them around your garden without needing to even visit a garden centre.
It's a great way of propagating plants and filling out your borders over time and I'm
going to show you how to do this today with one of these beautiful, all be it a bit slug
nibbled, Hostas.
They are a really easy plant to split and propagate by division.
When dividing plants you either need to do this early spring or early autumn because
this then gives the plant chance to recover.
What you dont want to be doing is splitting them in the winter months when its frosty,
cold, wet and damp because the chances are that both the parent plant and the new divided
plant are both going to struggle and die.
If I'm careful now I should just be able to lift this hosta up.
I've already loosened its root structure.
You can see here it's got a fantastic root ball there.
So this hosta is probably about 3 or 4 years old and I remember putting it in years ago!
So what we are going to do is divide this.
You can see here the Hosta is actually made up of probably 3 or 4 different 'eyes' and
what that means is its a separate stem, still connected in the root structure but almost
like a mini plant within a plant.
So you should be able to see all these roots now that I've lifted out and what I'm going
to do is use a sharp spade here along this edge to cut down in between the separate plants,
whilst its one plant you can see its separate shoots here and thats the best way to divide
these is cut through there cleanly and neatly and then plant on as quickly as you can.
So now I've made my division and I have a healthy plant here I'm going to take it and
plant it on in a bed that I have round the corner, you want to do this as quickly as
possible before it starts to lose too much moisture.
So what I'm going to do now is take the original plant that we took the division from and put
it back where it came from because thats the placement I want.
I just wanted to propagate it and take a new plant off there.
When you put this back in its important to bury it to the same depth it was when you
took it out.
You don't want to go too high or too low as that can shock the plant and it can get too
water logged things like that.
Try and keep the disturbance to a minimum.
I'm going to put it back in, backfill it and give it a bit of mulch.
Everyone knows how much I love a bit of mulch to help boost it then for next spring.
I have some high quality compost here, which is peat free so I'm going to use that as a
mulch which will be like a protective blanket around the recently divided hosta.
It's a good point to make now as you can probably tell that slugs got to these Hostas quite
early on and they haven't really been able to save them from them.
So next year I'll have to put in some more preventative measures to make sure we can
keep on top of my slug removal.
You can see all these holes in these beautiful leaves.
However, with a good mulch they will come back next year even stronger.
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