Playing with Potted Plants
I went out last night and added dirt to all my irises. I didn't really repot them in the technical sense, but over time and two divisions they've all lost a fair bit of their dirt, so most of them were several inches below the level of the top of their pots; I took out the entire chunk of dirt, added more in the bottom, then put the plant chunk back in (with the rhizomes as far as possible from the sides) and filled in. It used a surprising amount of dirt: all of one cubic-foot bag and about two thirds of a second. In the process I also uncovered the rhizomes in the pot labelled "Radiant Apogee"1, which were completely buried and much too damp. I just hope I got to them in time--they have leaves, but they're not looking happy at all.
Meanwhile the peas are happily growing. As long as the predicted cold temperatures over the weekend don't kill them, I'm pretty sure I can just let them do their thing.
1: I phrase it that way because I had all my pots labelled in non-waterproof marker, which got washed off by the rain. I made my best guesses at what had been where and relabelled, but the bloom last year demonstrated that I'd remembered wrong in at least one case. Therefore it's entirely possible that the pot that says Radiant Apogee actually contains Full Tide or Dover Beach or Night Edition. Hopefully everyone will bloom this year so I can get accurate labels again.