Divide Your Peonies

Do you have a peony or maybe you wanna give some to your friends? Let me show you the easiest way to divide peonies. It's really simple. Technically, you can divide a peony whenever you want. I would avoid doing it if you're in a heat wave or if you're in a drought. The plant's already under stress and when we divide it, we are going to disrupt those roots and stress it out a little bit more. Now the trick is when we get the roots out, we need to get an eye so that is where a new stem is going to grow. So the trick is dig a piece off where there's already an existing stem. That way you're sure that the tuber, the piece of the root that you get is going to have an eye on it so it'll grow for you next year. I'm gonna take my shovel and I'm basically just gonna go in between these stems here and try to carve a piece off. Just pry up. I'm gonna go on the side now. Pry it up. The front. Okay. I'm just gonna give it a tug. So there's the roots. We know we have multiple stems so these multiple stems here mean that there must be an eye on this section. Here is the tuber. Now there is a trick to planting peonies. Peonies cannot be planted too deeply in the soil because that's gonna insulate them from cold in the wintertime. Peonies don't set flowers if the roots don't go through a cold winter period. So as you can see here, the root is right here and there's hardly any, maybe an inch of soil on top. So we're gonna pull the mulch back. This is a full sun location with well-drained soil. We're not digging a very big hole, just enough to put the roots in there. I press the soil that came out right back in. I don't add any amendments, no fertilizer, nothing. Put the mulch back. Then we're gonna step around to remove air pockets and don't forget to water.