Our Dahlia Program
Hello!
We’ve had some inquiries about our lower maintenance dahlia crop. So I took a minute to film a short post about it for you.
Here are the pots we are using. Ours are size 7. We also kept some tubers over winter in smaller pots, but we’ll probably want to bump them up to a larger size to allow the plants to get nice and big this season.
Scroll down after the video for more information.
Last fall we dug the dahlias out of the ground for the last time. We have heavy clay soil here and it’s always a chore to dig them, compounded by the fact that we never get to it until the snow is flying. Then there’s the washing and drying and storing.
We dug them up. We put them (undivided) into large nursery pots and added some of our own made compost and clay soil from our land.
We put the pots under our greenhouse benches in our one minimally heated tunnel. We kept them off the ground in case of standing water, which happens from time to time in the late winter when we get a heavy rain on top of snow.
The tubers were buried in soil in the pots, so we didn’t worry about them drying out. They caught a little water here and there when it dripped through the benches from the plants above. I worried less about them than if I cleaned and divided and stored them in peat and wood shavings in the basement like I used to.
In the spring, once most of the cool season crops had been moved out of the greenhouse, we pulled the dahlia pots up on to the benches. They were already sprouting and leafing out. We held them there until there was no risk of frost outside.
And then we just moved them outside and lined up the pots for easier irrigation. We can top dress with soil and new compost if we want to.
The earliest varieties have already started blooming now in June. They are looking beautiful and healthy and they seem to have beat the first tarnished plant bugs. We just added some organza bags for protection now that we’re seeing some pests arrive. But all in all— it was a much nicer start to dahlia season for us. Of them, my favorites are Small World, Crichton Honey, and Totally Tangerine.
My dahlia collection is much smaller now than it used to be — a few hundred plants. It was once quite large, and I thought I needed to grow more and more and more every season like the larger farms. But the dahlias really don’t produce a ton of reliable flowers for me - or at least not when I grew them in our field or even in our unheated tunnels. I lost so much time waiting for the soil to warm and dry out and be safe for planting. Our new method eliminates all that waiting.
If we like, we can move the dahlia pots back under cover in the fall and hold on to our blooms a bit longer.
If I decide over time that I feel like cleaning and dividing tubers again or I want more of certain varieties, I’ll lift them from individual pots on my own schedule.