Transplanted Ostrich Ferns Coming Up - 2016

Last week, I posted about the giant hostas that we transplanted over at Nat's parents' house during our move and mentioned that we also moved a few other items at the same time.  One of them is pictured above peeking out of the mulch:  my ostrich ferns.

I dug up a few of these clumps of ferns and brought them over late last summer and Nat's mom found a nice shady spot for them to hang out.  I've split up these ferns in the past and had given a few to Nat's mom in the past, so having these come back and survive wasn't our top priority because I knew that we could always split up some of hers.

But...when we were over there recently, I spotted the little green parts starting to poke through.  Here's a bunch of the posts about these same ferns over the years here on the blog and you can see how they kind of un-curl as they grow.   These things spread out and multiplied like crazy for me at 274, but how we got them is an interesting story.  Either the old, wicked woman who lived in our house before us (who dug up everything that she could before she moved out) missed a few of these, our our neighbor Greg had enough of these shoot up from our side to his side to eventually repopulate back to our side of the fence.  One way or another, in the first year we were there, we had no ferns.  The next year?  A few.  And every year after that, even more.  They started in the back corner of our lot, but we moved them to a shady area and put our swingset in the back corner.

This Gardening-know-how post that I came across says that the best time to transplant ferns is in the early spring - "The best time to transplant ferns is early spring, while still dormant but just as new growth begins to emerge." - so I'm very likely to just leave these out in Naperville for this entire season and think about digging up the clumps in early Spring next year.  That gives them a full growing season to recover and they'll be less likely (at least in my mind) to get damaged and lost.

If things work out - and that is a HUGE *if* right now - I think we'll end up with both shade and sun gardens, so we'll be sure to have a good spot for the ferns to come back 'home'.