3,226 Garden Web Discussions | Dahlias
I would think you have a fungus of some type. Are you using a fan for air circulation? Did you sterilize your pots or are you using new pots? I would try some half strength fertilizer to see if you can out grow it. If not I would try a weak fungicide on them. Usually you get powdery mildew but it has to be a fungus if they are not getting burned from the lights.
I bought dahlias off of ebay last year from the guy who sells them in groups. They all came up and were all beautiful! It worked out really well for me last year. This I bought the specific types and colors I wanted.
"Patty Cake" was in the group I won, too. Very pretty.
-Kate
You may have been lucky! The key question is: Does the ground freeze in the winter where I live? If it is an unqualified yes then you are lucky and in a hard winter you may have lost quite a few. If the ground doesn't freeze then just mulch them with 4-6" of something like leaves or pine straw. I talked to a fellow one time that lived in Central Ohio and didn't dig his dahlias but he mulched them with a couple of feet of leaves. So they can stay in the ground if you do it right to prevent them from freezing.
Storing dahlias inside can cause dahlias to shrivel or rot if you don't use proper techniques so you must select one where you can be successful. Check out the Dahlia Society of Georgia web site menu item Dahlias That Grow Well in the South which discusses one and gives a website for another.
Here is a link that might be useful: Dahlia Society of Georgia
Well, it is probably a combination. I'm zone 6 & the last 3 years I have overlooked a few dahlias when digging in the fall, & "knock on wood" :) those have come back. They didn't get mulched, since I didn't intentionally leave them. We occasionally get a winter with temps below 0, but haven't the last few years. We do get below 10 a very few nights though, & still I see them come back. The ones I dig though do better, but that may be because I just left a piece of one. This fall I may just mulch really well & leave them in the ground.
Ah, ingenuity. Glad it works for you, Raul. Aren't the beams more expensive, or not, when all the sawing is done? You have to use what's available to you, that's for sure.
Just for fun, what was your high temperature today, give or take a degree?
Thanks Kristin and plantlady2,
I realize that....it's just like with the people who try to sell roses to unwary newbies. My sister-in-law, who always was a "know-it-all", (but who had never grown a rose before) tried to convince me that there was a "blue" rose. She wouldn't listen to my husband or myself. I think she was very disappointed to find that her blue rose was actually a pale lavender/mauve.
Phyl
What a conundrum. I would go with the plant's already established tendency and plant it "upside down" with the shoot for this year aiming skyward, the old stem downward, providing the shoot has a clear pathway through the tubers. Any other eyes that form and grow should find their way to heat and light from their upside down state.
I hope someone else chimes in. I've killed more bulbs in one lifetime by planting them wrong than should be legally allowed!
Plant them with the new shoot growing upwards- if you plant it down it will try to go up & take longer to get to the surface- they do go for the surface sooner or later but if you have very heavy soil they'll take forever to get there.
Cut off the old stalk as short as you can without damaging the new ones or the tubers. If they're like most bagged tubers that you get at the nursery, there's a lot of broken necks & damaged tubers anyway & you can just prune them off & start with a nice clean, viable tuber with it's new shoot going upwards.
You may want to ask the people in both of the large dahlia groups. Garden web will strip the subscription information, so please send me an email and I will send you the information.
-Aaron
Webmaster of Dahliasuppliers.com
providing you sources of wonderful dahlia tubers from Mingus Dahlias and Accent Dahlias.
Here is a link that might be useful: Dahliasuppliers.com
I'm going to give him a try. I have pink-shade lilies in that same bed, and plan on putting kiss-me-over-the-garden-gate there too, so I think with Thomas and some wine-colored coleus, it'll be a really dramatic wine and pink late-summer bed.
It's a funny thing, when I Googled it, so many of the commercial pics of Thomas Edison were obviously photoshopped to be more purple/blue toned. But the amateur photos uniformly showed more of a magenta shade, so I figure I'm good.
Kristin
Hi Phyl! I haven't been checking this forum too much yet this season. Sorry but I would never have seen your post if a friend hadn't called me and told me she saw a post to me at GW!
I don't leave the links up for that long because it takes a lot of bandwidth from my webpage.
I got my stargazer seeds (Unwins brand) from a local nursery, but I know you can get them from Park Seed.
Good luck and I hope you like them as much as I do!
Thanks so much, Jackie! I didn't know what the red Xs meant. I'll look into Park Seed. I love dahlias, but know that I am just too busy to have to store them for the winter correctly, so I don't want to spend $4-6 per tuber! So I am hoping that seeds will work. :0) Phyl
Hi Phyl,
What is a grocery-store type dahlia? Assuming you mean tubers mass packaged for the big box stores. Which also means that the dahlia in your package may or may not be Bahama Apricot. There's a 20-25% chance that it will not.
Bahama Apricot isn't a large flowering dahlia. It is a shogun. The blooms are 4" which are perfectly nice for your cutflower bouquets.
Our last frost date is the same as yours. We plant our tubers for field production usually around May 1. The last couple of years, it has actually been the last week in April. Ground temperature is the most important factor to consider when planting your tuber/s. Ideally, dahlias need 5 hours of sun. Dahlia plants grow taller here in the midwest and the northeast.
Then again, you could start your tuber in a pot now; and, transplant it out when you're planting your other plants in the garden. You would have blooms sooner.
You can Google Shogun Bahama Apricot for a photo. In the future, you may want to check the Big List for information on dahlias and suppliers.
Trish
Here is a link that might be useful: The Big List
Trish,
Thanks so much for all your help here! Coming from you, I know it is EXCELLENT advice! Yes, I meant that I picked it up at my grocery store cheap. I'm so excited to see my first crocus...so tired of winter. I bookmarked The Big List for future reference. :0) Phyl
Yes, probably, I have too much stuff out in the garden to remember to dig them up in the fall. I also have some tubers I saved from last year in peat out in the garage. It's funny, I work at a garden center, & we only sell containerized dahlias now, because my boss says people are impatient, they don't want to plant tubers, they want it blooming or ready to bloom now! Of course, we won't get those in for awhile, until it warms up...I did read somewhere about planting them half height in the pot & then adding soil gradually as it sprouts, is this right?
I wish I could forget to dig up in the fall..... Too wet and cold here though.
I don't know that you need to do the half height planting and slow covering with soil in a pot. Pots, and their soil, get more widespread sun exposure and heat up better and dry out faster than garden beds. I had great luck just plunking a tuber in a large pot at full 6 inch depth last year. But in cool, moist spring soil, the slowly-filling-the-hole- method is a good idea out in the garden.
HiNami,
I'm new to this Dahlia stuff too. They are pretty.
I live further south( Pembroke Pines) and planted one bought at walmart ,it is growing and it is in full sun. I went back to walmart this morning and saw they had a bag with purple variety( 4 tubers)( van bourgondien) on sale for $5.00 That was a deal!! So far the first one, is growing really nice big huge deep purple flowers with a yellow center and lots of flowers on the plant, ( the bag said it would be red:-(
If it does not survive the heat here o well, it was not expensive. I think your soil would be better too(loose sand) here I have lots of rocks in sand.
Well hope this helps.
Yinyang
Go to the Dahlia Society of Georgia website and select the menu item 'dahlias that grow well in the South' and then select the heat tolerant dahlias page. All of these dahlias should do well in Central Florida. Also, the growing guide on that same page is for the South so follow it closely. Make sure you mulch your dahlias and water them enough to get them through the heat of the summer and then you should get some good blooms in October and November. You can cut them back in the middle/late August and that will stimulate them to grow well when some cooler weather arrives.
We have a new member in the Georgia Dahlia Society that just moved from the Ocala area where he grew dahlias and I grew them in the San Antonio, Texas area for a few years so they can be grown in these areas.
Go to dahlias.net and then the big list to find where to buy these tubers.
Here is a link that might be useful: Dahlia Society of Georgia