Laughing Ravens

 Dahlias can simultaneously be both wicked tough and fickle to the point of being delicate. In a nutshell, they are tubers that just happen to make really pretty flowers. If potatoes were as fussy of a tuber, we wouldn't have french fries. I bring up potatoes for two reasons. One: you can eat dahlia tubers. That would be silly and wasteful, but nonetheless true. Two: their storage needs are very similar. Most of us keep potatoes in our house for a week or two before we consume them. If we had to keep the potatoes over the entire winter, then we'd be more aware of the myriad conditions that ensure safe storage. More on that at the end. Let's start out with discussing digging and cleaning. If you're an expert on dahlias, please feel free to correct any of my observations in the comments.  When should you dig your dahlias? In my zone 6 (really more of 5b) garden, we usually see a killing frost sometime in October, generally before Halloween. By killing frost, I mean the ki...

unknown variety of dahlia   What changed? How does one go from not caring one iota about dahlias to suddenly having huge plantings of them throughout the garden? For that matter, how does one afford such largesse?  The simple answer is that dahlias are seductive. They lure you in with their rich color and forms... and then you're hooked. Luckily, they are also (generally) prolific growers. One tuber begets many tubers. This is a good thing because buying new tubers can be expensive.     What I discovered in year two was that dahlias grown from seed are a crap shoot.  I don't mean that it isn't worth doing, but rather you have no clue what you might get. Dahlias are promiscuous as can be. I can't count the number of photographs I have of dahlias that have bees in them. I would guess over 2/3 of the images have bees in them. None of my other flowers in the garden have that level of attraction. One caveat I will mention is that bees are drawn to the open cente...

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 bl...