Episode: 10
Title: Dividing Plants
Broadcast: May 27 2017
Presenter: Trevor Cochrane

If you want to save money and fill your garden full of lovely plants there are so many that make a wonderful addition and it’ll cost you a little more than your mother plant to get started, Trev explains how.

• Strappy leaf plants would have to be the easiest you could grow and even better to split and propagate.
• Trevor shows us his truly beautiful Sacred Lily of the Incas, which is an absolutely gorgeous lily-like plant, has slight bulbs and it produces the most amazing white flowers. If you want lots of them all you have to do is split them.
• Cut around the outside edges just off the root-ball and then lift it. This work is always best done with a long-handled sound-mouth spade. The long handle is your leverage point here. Use it to take the strain off your back and use your feet to push the blade into the soil and ease back.
• Now the next part is quite a process. What you’ve got to do is basically split them carefully from the outside edge making sure you take some roots with you.
• The other thing that you’ve got to do is cut the foliage off with your secateurs and prune and then dunk the foliage into a bucket with Seasol, let them soak for a while. After they’ve had a good soak take them out of the bucket and let them dry thoroughly before taking them to their new home for planting.
• Simply dig a hole into the existing soil- now you don’t need to dig a lot and you don’t need to improve the soil, these plants have grown in this so they’re used to it and when you plant them out don’t dig them in too deep, just plant them at the same level they were previously.
• From one large clump we now have 28 individual plants and these will take about 3 years to really clump out to the extent that the mother plant was.

The Garden Gurus
W: www.yourlifestyle.tv