Okay, so now we have this in a nice rounded ball. I'd like to add that you should pick a day that's a cloudy day to dig and transplant your perennials. To do it on a really, really hot day would put a little extra stress on the plant. A cloudy day is best. So now that we've got this nice plant, I've got my scooping shovel here. I'm going to just scoop insert. You can see how I've got a nice, good section, a big ball of iris here. Now, one thing that you can do if your iris plant is good and you might be working by yourself and not have anybody to help you, you can get it out as I'm doing and you can actually take your spade and kind of cut it in half if it's too heavy to lift yourself. Now, I have a piece that I've presoaked because you don't want your roots to get exposed. This is fairly heavy soil that I'm working in here. It's got a lot of clay content in it. This probably weighs a good 80 pounds, believe it or not. I'm going to flip it up. You can see all the nice fibrous roots here. This is a good, healthy root system. You want to try to keep as much of the soil intact to the root. You don't really want it to fall away so I'm going to take up here just so I can move my plant to the new area that I want it to go. I'm just going to tuck it down there and I'm just going to flip that right on top. Rock it back up and walla. I've got my iris in a nice little cradle here. I'm going to get it out of the hole. Bend your knees. Bend your knees always when you're doing heavy lifting, and out it comes. All intact. No roots really exposed too much. All the soil is there and this plant is ready for division.
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