I have been working on various gardens around here that the previous owners g-ma and gg-ma planted in, but pretty much languished for the 5-10 years before I moved in in 2011.

Over the years I've dug out daffodil, iris, and lillies, transferred pots of hot pokers, alliums, tulips...

This year in one of the areas it's time to dig up and split up all the hyacinths. I've coaxed them along for years, bringing the few left in the old bed back to a plush enough mass- through waiting for bulbs to do their thing and also scattering any seed pods I found every years.

So just how deep can a hyacinth cluster get? I found out with daffs they can get really deep, but irises are rather shallow. And so on. Before I lay fork or shovel to the area... what am I digging myself into? Should I use a fork to tine deep and work out bulbs, like I do with daff clusters? Use a shovel and just dig out whole hunk like what works well with lillies? Or what?