Back to Thinking About Garden Stuff

dahlia, unknown ID, 2024

That last blog post was so dark. Must be the lack of sunlight affecting my holiday mood. Back to talking about garden-ish stuff.

We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.

In the Spring of 2021, Leto and were driving down Main Street, heading out of town, when we spotted a box on the side of the road that read: Free Dahlias. Red. Pink. 

I don't know about you, but I brake for dahlias.

Actually, I had never grown dahlias. I had always heard they were fussy. Too work intensive. And besides, they were just flowers. How good could they be?

We stopped along the side of the road, spun the car around and stopped to retrieve the box of pink and red dahlias. Laughter filled the car as we realized that our combined knowledge of what to do with a box of dahlias could be summed up as: plant 'em and see what happens. 

 

What we discovered in the summer of 2021 was that these tubers really wanted to grow! Planted just after Mother's Day, they were blooming by the middle of July. They continued blooming until our first killing frost in October of that year.  Both the reds and the pink were addictive. We had no clue what we were doing.  As a result, when the killing frosts came through in October, all we knew is that we needed to dig them up and save them over the winter.

 

This pink dahlia has been a raging disappointment. It flops over. It never impresses. And then once in a while, it looks amazing. Sigh.

For our first winter, I had no idea how to divide dahlia clumps. I watched a few YouTube videos, but decided that it was too risky. I am laughing now as I type that, four years later. Risky. As if these tubers were going to bite me. Being an idiot, I put these large clumps into sawdust, and then put them into a cardboard box. The best storage solution I could come up with four years ago was our poorly heated garage. By January, most of the tubers were looking pretty shriveled... which indicated that it was too dry for them. I sprayed a little water on the sawdust, and put the cardboard box into a garbage bag. Now I had too little air. 

Went from shriveling to mold of nearly every color imaginable. In hindsight, I am amazed that any of these tubers survived our first winter. That's how we learn, right? Either that or we kill plants. Hey, that's a great idea for a t-shirt for our nursery: We Kill Plants. I bet that would be a huge hit with our marketing department.  I could probably sell my other favorite t-shirt which reads: I AM WRONG. I bet folks would buy one in each hand. 

Okay, back to reality. And dahlias.

 

Red dahlias with dark stems

When Spring arrived, we threw out probably a half dozen large clumps. But there were probably more than 18 clumps that were fine. We potted them up and watched them struggle when we set them outside in the sub 50°F weather. One of the things we learned during our second year growing dahlias... they are warm climate plants. They originate from Mexico and Central America. WARM climates. Not upstate New York in April. Another learning opportunity.... sigh.

 

Pink dahlias in year two

In my excitement of our second year, I decided to try two new things. Buying tubers online and planting dahlias from seed. I had virtually no expectation that either option would result in anything amazing. I was fully prepared for disappointment. I ordered dahlia seed from Baker Creek (before they invited white supremacist Cliven Bundy to speak at one of their festivals)... and germination was so-so. I ordered more seeds from Swallowtail Garden Seeds and was much happier. Pretty sure in 2022, we ended up getting seeds from the Cactus Flowered Hybrids and Figaro Mix to produce a handful of seedlings. 

The image at the top of the post is from this year and is a NOID dahlia that we picked up in a grab bag order from someone off of Facebook. It is probably my favorite dahlia. If you know the variety, I would love to be able to identify it.