The 10-minute (or more) Gardener - Cleanup and Dividing the Agapanthus

Today has been a productive day in many regards, so after accomplishing stuff at my desk and computer, there was some time (and motivation) to do a bit in the garden, too.

I know I make everyone north of me jealous, instead of planting bulbs this time of year, ours are starting to grow. We had an early rain this year, 2-3 weeks ahead of the usual (according to my gardening journal) and this morning I saw the first bulbs poking their heads above all the leaf litter.
This was one reason I wanted to get out and work today -- to provide an easier time for the emerging bulbs.

(Click any picture for larger photos and additional photos in this set. -- Douglas)

As you probably read, we did our semi-annual roof cleaning last week. This always results in a large clump of leaves being pushed into the flower bed near the back patio. Today, I set out to clear as much of that bed as possible. I quickly filled our green gardening bin provided by the city, and started a new leaf mold-only compost pile by the back wall, in the space opened by demolishing our old garden shed.

There are several large clumps of Agapanthus in this bed and I have been meaning to divide them for years, but never got around to it. In cleaning up the leaves, though, the rhizomes of the Agapanthus came right up with them. They had pushed themselves completely out of the soil.

So, with that, my project grew a bit. After I cleared the leaves from about 1/2 of the bed, I took out the Troy-Bilt mini-cultivator (Review | Audio | Video) I received a few months ago and cultivated the general area. I had to avoid the large tree root and some existing plantings, but in the end I worked up a fairly large area. I then selected the healthiest looking Agapanthus rhizomes and distributed them in a trench basically where they had originally been, but much more spread out. A few minutes of backfilling (and replanting any other bulbs we had turned up in our work), some heavy watering and we were done. There is one more large clump that will probably get the same treatment when we clean out the other end of this bed.

All told, today's project took about any hour, but I was also able to make it into my daily workout instead of taking my usual 2 mile walk.