 Pekis Valley, Iris Gardener, Sue Chambers, is an expert on growing irises and a lot of other things. And today Sue is going to show us how to prepare the soil so these things will grow well. Now in our zero-scape we've got some plants that don't need this but a lot of our gardens, our vegetable gardens and such will need this kind of work. And Sue, how do you know that this soil needs to be worked on? Well this this particular bed that I have emptied was it looked more or less like this one. And you can see the difference in the way this bed looks which is about a year and a half old. And this one's about five years old. So time is part of it? Yes so they need nutrients. And we've got to remember that Iris is a perennial so it occupies the same piece of ground for many years depleting the minerals there and our soils tend to bind up some of our micronutrients. We've got to work to replace it. And we can see that some of these also show some chlorosis or yellowing between the veins. And that's probably a nutrient deficiency as well. That's true it is. When you wait five years to add some nutrients to the soil they just don't have anything to help them along. And so therefore I think that it's it's good to go ahead and and do them by over three years. Often the first step in amending soil is getting the soil tested. But Sue already knows from years of experience which nutrients need to be added to her soil to grow prize irises. So today our first step is loosening the soil. Because this is a small bed hand tools work just fine. Now we're ready for step two adding the amendments. We'll start with alfalfa pellets. These will decompose and add nitrogen to the soil. Next we'll add just a little bit of sand which helps loosen the soil so the roots can grow deeper. But watch out. Too much sand added to clay can make a doby good for bricks but not for gardens. Now we'll add humus and manure to add nitrogen and improve soil structure. Sue likes to add cotton burr compost that also adds nitrogen and helps the soil hold water. And we'll add gypsum which conditions a soil and helps plants use the nutrients that we've added. The third and final step is to mix these additives into the soil and rake it smooth. You can plant now or wait a few months while these amendments improve the soil. Some perennial beds have a variety of plants with different requirements for care. You can dig some up to work the area. With other plants you can't dig up use the spating fork to help get the amendments down into the soil without damaging plant roots. We did all this by hand. If they wanted to do something as large as this whole bed they might want to use a rototiller. That's true. Of course the exercise is good. They would because well it goes so much faster with the rototillers but especially if your soil is hard. Yes. But this was soft today so this wasn't bad to do by hand. I know as you had it moist and forest too and that makes a lot of difference in your Mexico. Soil is dry it's hard. Thank you sir.