3,226 Garden Web Discussions | Dahlias
I am not much of an advocate of overwintering in the ground. Many people in mild climates do so but there are lots of stories of rodents eating the tubers. Good luck and too much nitrogen will cause overwintered dahlias to rot, especially if there is a wet winter. I assume the dahlias will go dormant in the winter and that you will not fertilize for about 6 weeks before they go dormant.
Hi beigestonehill, pdshop & Y'all;
Sorry to be so late with the answer to your questions.
Thank you for your thanks. Yes, some of them are "Yummy". They have to be to have entry into our family's and close friend's annual calendar
We are located on the North Shore of Ma, a few miles out of Boston. We fertilize with 5-10-5, 2 weeks apart early in the season. The 2nd one approx.1 week before planting. We follow the info suggested by Swan Island Dahlias after fertilizing, bone meal, no watering, slug bait etc.and add 5" X 5" X 2.5" vinyl squares around the sprouts when they appear to help retain water and act as a deterrent to slugs. Rabbits are very bothersome.
We do disagree with Swan Island's writings to not use bark mulch. We do on some of our beds to help control weeds.
Some years a few blooms appear early in this cooler climate while others are much later. The expected late bloomers are very questionable. We do have a late one that did blossom on 1 Sep.
Should anyone have other comments or questions please submit.
Charlie
Your method with adding conduit as the plants grow is really ideal! Your bed has a nice clean look to it that is enviable. Thank you for sharing, Charlie!
I just couldn't imagine finding the time to tie two hundred plants continuously, much less adding conduit to the ones needing it! Then you have to store all that pipe! One year I used pcv pipes to stake sixty plants, and had a lot of breakage as I couldn't keep up with it all with young kids and my two businesses. Kudos to you for doing this so well!
Although the horizontal row support and row twine is visible and may be seen as an eye-sore, it is the only way I will grow more then twenty plants from now on. It takes ten minutes to add another row of twine to a hundred plants at a time, and the tight hedge growing style keeps most weeds at bay. Disbudding, cutting and deadheading is the main maintenance with this system at this point, thank goodness. Then the real labor starts with frost, but let's not think of that yet. :-)
Check out how the same view as two weeks ago has changed...
Not directly bug related. Might be a fungus, invited by the overwatering, but not sure.
The foliage looks healthy, though sparse. Just pull off the brown leaves and black buds so the plant knows to grow out more, and discard waste away from your plants to avoid giving bad bugs or fungus places to hide/grow.
This occasionally happens, and it seems random with no clear cause. The plant will most likely shake it off, and start producing normally in a week or so.
A bit of fertilizer sprayed on the leaves might help it shake off whatever is ailing it. Think of it as a vitamin supplement to help you over a cold.
Well, I installed the watering system halfway through the growing season, so most of the early growth didn't get enough water. Now I have watered deeply twice a week and fertilized twice in August, and the top growth is much better. Now I know for next year! I'll have to see what I can do about the fungus potential, though. That's in a low spot along the foundation plantings. I will have to pull them up this winter and put in some new soil, or maybe just put the soil right over the top of them since I can overwinter in the ground.
for drgulley-friends in england say they think your flower is kilburn glow- to me the pics dont seem close but steve says he saw it at southport show and it is the same-kilburn won best of show a couple of years ago so probably worth growing anyway
Hi again;
I failed to mention in my previous posting we have found that spending a little more and using yarn rather than twine, we use green and buy it in 2 pound skeins, there does not appear any harm to the stalks/stems at all when tied loosely.
Charlie
Thank you for the responses. I use 52" tomato cages for staking. I have only minor problems with broken stems. Just the blossoms.
I prep the bed in spring with 10-10-10. Then feed once a month with 15-30-15. Next spring I will prep with bone meal to boost the phosphorus. Thanks for the idea. I'm not sure about boosting the Potassium. I put a few left-over bulbs on the edge of my corn patch. Corn is K-intensive. Although I get adequate blooms, the plants are two feet shorter than the same bulbs in my main garden.
Yes it is only certain cultivars: Wheels and Poodle Skirt. Both are novelty blooms.
It kind of depends on your local market prices--I'd take a look at what others charge there. Prices will certainly be far higher in more urban locations than in suburban or country ones.
'Round here, I can lay hands on a 4" potted plant for about $6-$7 for something unusual but not exotic. If I drove half an hour south I could do it for $4 to $5.
Are you sure either is accurate? All the pH meters I've had have read in the same range--all of them wrong by almost 1 point.
I did try a simple soil-water-reactant test out of idle curiosity. The pH actually was very accurate...if I were trying to test the pH of our water.
good Lord! I did start a hard topic. This year in CO, it has rained constantly. Never happened before. That will help wash out the salt in my soil as it was high in salt. I have basically solved the whole matter. Moving back to where I came from and had big, tall, thick dahlias. I do love some of the CO plants and hope to try some. Thanks for all your info.
>>Unless i have this wrong, i'm pretty sure all dahlia's have tubers and are tender perennials, not true annuals.
Correct, although I treat my Harlequin as annuals as a general rule. I don't have to, they could be lifted.
Really, a lot of plants in our gardens are short-lived perennials we treat as annuals in our respective climates.
>>I don't know anything about dahlia seed in particular, but i can tell you that no plant seed conceived naturally is the exact same as the parent,
By definition, although I've collected seed from plenty of Salvia species and the daughters are the same as the mothers, for the most part. Over time, the Salvia splendens are getting a bit taller and I did breed a few cultivars together to get the leaf and flower style I wanted.
Dahlia are incredibly unpredictable. We humans have two copies of each chromosome. Many flowering plants have more than two (even some with odd numbers like some zinnia species--Profusion has three). It helps if you can't meander around and find a mate whose genes don't resemble yours by keeping harmful mutations from reinforcing as easily.
That's why plants can self-fertilize and the daughters usually do just fine.
Dahlia have eight copies of each chromosome! (The technical term is "octoploidal.") The number of possible recombinations just on a self-fertilization is incredible.
Unfortunately it means it's hard to breed any two plants and get anything you expect.
The only reliable way to reproduce a dahlia with the same characteristics as the parent is by cloning. You can split the tubers, or root a green shoot, both work fine.
Most of us split the tubers to reproduce our dahlia but some people around here do root cuttings.
Thank you guys for the information! So I guess I shouldn't be asking for "Pooh" seeds anymore! :-) I'm going to try out the Mignon seeds I just got in a trade, and that seed packet on Swan Island's website is so tempting . . . because of the beautiful picture!
Powdery mildew gets much worse as the weather cools down later in the year. I saw an organic gardeners dahlia patch that looked like field of snow white dahlias(leaves not flowers) on about August 10th one year.
Whatever you do, keep on top of it. Once a plant turns totally white on all leaves, it starts to die and the tubers do not store as well.
I have not sprayed my garden for insects in over ten years. But I have had to spray for powdery mildew each of the last 4 years.
To grow early dahlias, you do not want 2 foot tall plants but rather plants about 12-18 inches tall. You would start taking cuttings in March and the goal would be to have the plants ready to go into the ground about May 20th or so in your area(but watch for killing frost warnings). I leave all our cuttings in the 2.5 inch pots in the greenhouse and grow them tall using 20-20-20 greenhouse fertilizer(Jack's or Plantex). You can bury the root ball slightly deeper when you plant. 12-18 inch tall plants will start growing immediately and will bloom many weeks earlier than tuber plants. However, they do not grow well in shade. Dahlias want full sun. You get lots of flooding rains there that we do not get. It is hard on tubers that are just starting to sprout. I think plants from cuttings may be just bit more hardy but standing water kills all dahlias in a day or two especially in warm weather. One cannot grow plants to the 12-18 inches without a greenhouse. You can root them under florescent lights but they do not grow well after that. I move the rooted cuttings to a heated greenhouse about 20 days after taking the cutting. About 11 days to root the cutting and another 9 or so days to grow some roots to survive in greenhouse.
Wait for the dahlia blossom to fade totally and let it dry on the bush. The stem should be dead behind the flower before you remove it. The seeds are in the base portion of the flower and you can clean off the dead flower portion.
Seeds look kind of like triangles, are black, and fairly hard. You can find tons of photos of the seeds online.
Now a warning: daughters of dahlia don't breed anywhere near true--the dahlia has 8 sets of each chromosome. Even self-pollinated flowers throw seeds that differ markedly from the parent, and the difference is only very rarely positive.