How To Divide Black Eyes Susans

A couple of tools that you can use. I just have nice, handy, old, regular bow saw. That's what I would call it. Also, just an ordinary old kitchen bread knife that has some serrated edges on it. These make really good tools for cutting into perennials and dividing them. You can see that's there's a fairly condense clump on this side and a few smaller plants on this side. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to cut this away here with my bread knife and cut down and just pull this plant off. We're going to do something with that a little later. This one here I’m going to take my bigger saw. I always examine the plants. I try to pull away any leaf debris or dead leaves that are down in the base so I can kind of see the individual little clusters of plants that there is. It looks to me like I can get several different plants out of this. I'm going to try to do it in quarters. I'm going to cut right down the middle here and get it in half first with my saw. Once you get that first tough section, it's pretty easy cutting. Now I have 2 sections. I'm going to do it once again. I'm going to cut it right down the middle. Because we did such a good job of digging, we've got a lot of soil matter here that you can barely even really see the root system because they're so densely in the soil matter itself.