How To Divide Hostas In The Fall – Give Your Hostas New Life! : Fall is the ideal season to divide our unkempt and overgrown hostas. It will not only assist to freshen up your fall flowerbeds, but it will prime your hostas for maximum performance the following year. The best part is that you can end up with a ton of fresh hosta plants for nothing at all!
One of the most widely used perennial plants is the hosta. They can provide color and vibrancy to flowerbeds all spring and summer long with their expansive canopy of leaves and tall, airy blossoms. However, the majority of hosta plants start to display signs of seasonal wear and tear by early September.
How To Divide Hostas In The Fall – Give Your Hostas New Life!
The leafy plants frequently remain frayed and shredded by the end of summer. The plants are frequently wracked with holes and severely damaged by animals or vermin searching for a quick meal. Worse worse, the leaves are weakened, brittle, and discolored as a result of the damaging effects of the scorching summer sun.
Dealing With Overgrown Hostas
With every year that goes by, hosta plants that have overcrowded roots start to collapse earlier and earlier. Furthermore, flowering also declines. So much so that they won’t even flower at all if they get too overgrown.
However, you can rejuvenate your plants and keep them healthy, bright, and most importantly, growing and blooming strongly for years by just digging them up and splitting them into new divisions.
Why Autumn? How To Divide Hostas In The Fall
Fall is when division is most effective since hosta plants are just starting to get ready for hibernation. The parent and newly divided plants experience less stress as a result of the lower temperatures.
Above all, however, splitting in the fall gives the young transplants approximately a month to take root before winter hits. Regretfully, if you wait until spring to divide, your hostas may not reach their full potential in their first growing year.
Because of the autumnal division and transplanting, the roots are well-established by the time April arrives. This also indicates that they are more than prepared to begin growing in the early spring!
ALSO SEE
How To Divide Hostas In The Fall
Cutting Back The Foliage
It’s time to take action in the early fall when your plants start to wither or fail. Firstly, trim back all of the foliage on your hostas to a depth of about one or two inches below the soil’s surface. This applies to all of your hostas, not just the ones you wish to divide.
Why is it so crucial to trim back foliage? In the end, letting any decaying leaves accumulate in your beds gives disease and vermin the ideal spot to settle in. They can overwinter there and return the following year after they’ve found that home.
However, pruning back plants also makes it much easier to remove any overgrown ones and divide them. It can be challenging to decide where to cut and divide with all of that foliage on top, after all!
Digging Out Overgrown Plants – How To Divide Hostas In The Fall
Plants that have received water during division are more hardy. Additionally, it facilitates their digging and working.
With a sharp shovel, carefully excavate the hosta’s perimeter. Make sure to slice all the way around the edge, down three to four inches into the ground. Subsequently, make a deeper cut along one edge and raise the entire cluster off the ground.
If you chance to run into a few of the edge roots, don’t worry. Hostas are tough plants that do well when divided. It might even be necessary to excavate the hosta in sections if it is really overgrown.
Transplanting – How To Divide Hostas In The Fall
Create new transplant holes that are around 1.5 times as large as the cutting. After that, plant the new division in the hole, ensuring that the crown of the roots is level with the ground by combining equal parts compost and dirt.
The freshly divided transplants may produce new shoots before winter arrives, depending on the weather. This merely indicates that the roots have deeply ingrained themselves in the chilly fall soil. The plant will finally go into hibernation for the winter when a harsh frost or cold kills off the fresh development.
Mulching For Winter Protection – How To Divide Hostas In The Fall
Before winter sets in, mulch all of your hostas after they have been trimmed back and any divisions or transplants have been planted.
Mulching your perennial beds after you divide your hostas in the fall might help them stay robust. Mulch aids in protecting the roots of plants from fluctuations in temperature. Plants might suffer damage or possibly die as a result of swings that induce excessive freezing and thawing.
Mulching also prevents weed seeds and competing weeds from blowing in and taking over. The first step in fall mulching is to lightly cover each plant’s crown with one inch of compost. Next, cover the entire plant with a two to three inch layer of conventional mulch.
