Splitting Hostas Up in Early Spring

Sandy in Canton, asks, ‘I have a question about the hosta plant. Do the hosta plants spread on their own? Are you talking about just getting bigger as a clump or by seed? When I moved into this house 20 plus years ago, I had hostas all around and I just love it. So I’m not familiar with actually digging them out. When is the best time to dig them out or transplant them?’

It’s very rare that they’re going to do that by seed. You’d have to let the flowers go completely to seed and dry off and that kind of stuff. Most people don’t let them go that long. They usually spread more and better by a clump. And you can divide them very easily too.

Early spring is best to move them, because the ground’s still really soft. As soon as the ground’s really workable and you can get in there and it’s not too mucky, you can do that. You just want to take a sharp spade. A lot of times you’ll see a dead part in the center where it’s kind of died out. That’s kind of a good indication that it’s ready to be split.

And you can really, you can just dig it up and split it into a few pieces. So we’ll dig all the way around the plant, pop it up out of the ground, and then we’ll either cut it in half with a shovel, a machete, or a sawzall. I’ve seen many different things. Ideally, you want to do a clean cut. So a shovel or a large cutting knife would be probably your best bet there. But sometimes you can dig up like one that’s two feet around and make eight, ten, twelve plants out of that. They’re very forgiving. Hostas are very easy to split.

And this is the perfect time of year to do it. If you brush the mulch back, you’ll see all the eyes and starts coming up out of the ground. You just go out a few inches from that and dig a circular pattern around it, and it’ll pop right out.

Questions? Email us at [email protected] or call one of our two locations: Portage (330-499-0101) or Everhard (330-492-1243).