A hose hooked up to pipes provides water for three cleaning wands.
Reclaimed lumber and sinks kept the price low.
the high 90s (this is the desert), so they probably didn’t
mind too much.
In the past, the club purchased Sharpie markers
which were used to mark directly on the rhizome leaves.
Information written on the leaves included name,
year introduced, type, RE, space ager, very brief color
description, and price. As you can imagine, this could take
a while to write, especially if the name was 30 characters.
Why can’t hybridizers name the irises something short?
Has anyone named an iris after Jupiter’s moon Io? The
advantage of writing on leaves is that the rhizomes are
washed afterwards. The ink doesn’t come off in the water.
We now do things differently. We no longer write on
the leaves but instead print with a laser printer on label
paper. I have written code for Excel that can generate the
labels. You tell it the name of the iris and the quantity of
rhizomes. The program searches for the iris name on an
Excel worksheet that contains more than 6,000 irises the
club has owned throughout the years. It pulls the relevant
information and writes it to another worksheet that has
been formatted to match whatever paper we are using for
A pipe drains water away from the sinks
into nearby bushes, keeping sneakers dry.
Labels are printed on a laser printer and
added to tags. Twine is used to attach the tags.
the labels. If you have 50 ‘Dusky Challenger’ rhizomes, it
will create 50 ‘Dusky Challenger’ labels. The page(s) are
printed and the club can pull the label off the page and
attach to the rhizome. In the past, we used labels that were
12 to a page and wrapped each one around a rhizome.
However, they could come off. Last year we purchased
tags with a hole in the top. We attached the label (20 to a
page this time) to the tag and then attached the tag to the
rhizome with twine. We didn’t like the twine, so our current
president recommended pipe cleaners for this year.
(Apparently they are cheap if you buy in bulk.) Hopefully,
that will work better than the twine. We also no longer
put the iris color on the tag. All of our rhizomes at the
Fall 2018 AIS Bulletin 41