3,226 Garden Web Discussions | Dahlias
I grew Sky Angel last year and it never got bluer then a medium lavender. IT must like your heat! I am glad to know it really does get this blue for you. My son bought if for me so I have a special feeling for it! I hope your Strawberry Ice and Seattle improve over the summer. I have a Gitts Respect that is supposed to be red with orange tips and is opening bright yellow with red streaks, but we have hardly had a day over 65 degrees yet. I am sure it will color up over the summer. Summer just doesn't start here until July.
I don't take cuttings myself but I know one grower who takes a specified number of cuttings then plants the tuber. One can then take stem cuttings and root them off the growing plant if you want. I would think that taking endless cuttings from a tuber would exhaust it of stored energy after a while.
Interesting. I didnt even know your could grow Dahlias from cuttings. Liza lily's suggestion of taking stem cutting makes sense. Right now, if I wanted to, I could snip 6-8 growing tip cuttings off of each of my plants. I may try a few in the fall just to experiment.
I suspect you are not getting any answers because you are looking for a definitive answer for something not easy to define.
Meaning (and this is my 2 cents worth) - dahlias are both finicky and yet they are adaptive to their known environment. That is only how I can explain my garden full of flowers when we have summers where you may not see the sun for months. Granted, sun can filter thru fog anyway but my dahlias that have been in the yard a year or more tend to get better with age and have adapted to the fact that the ground is almost permanently moist from fog, the dahlias get so wet the larger ones tend to fall over and the sun (on good days) shines only about 5-6 hours.
I have found that when they get a good dose of sun daily (like this spectacular year) they tend to wilt after blooming. So I have deduced they have adapted to their conditions and have learned to prosper even during 60 straight foggy days, like last year.
This year, I planted 6 dahlias in the shadiest part of the yard and so far 5 have sprouted, one is almost blooming and one is MIA so far. This part of the yard gets about 4 hours of direct sun on a good day and they seem to be doing fine anyway.
In a nutshell, despite what growers tell you, I think dahlias can do fine without 8 hours of sunlight. My yard in August can prove it.
Thank you so much for this gift - really, for what you sent me vs. what I sent you in postage... All I can say is that I am humbly in your debt.
I have planted about half of the tubers. I was outside until 9:30 pm planting rows and rows. I should get the rest planted tomorrow evening. I will now be axiously awaiting emergence.
Thank you once again! Hopefully, I'll be able to take some pictures of your dahlias around September. :)
I just moved to Denver. I thought with no rain my tubers would be up in no time. No way! In MA. where I came from, there were slugs, snails, rabbits, gophers, etc. to contend with. None of that here. Next year I will try plants for sure. They will have to be hardened off before I can plant them though. Corralto's is just plants. I use them sometimes.
I'd say go for it. You will only be out the cost of the tuber if it doesn't work, and actually, you may be able to harvest some tubers from it for next year. And if it works, you totally win!
Some of my biggest dahlias are barely coming up and I may well have to do this with them...they were very slow germinators. Same thing happened last year with dahlias from this breeder but I got good tubers and were able to start them much earlier this year in my greenhouse.
I am only a few miles from you over the border in WI. I was gifted with a number of additional tubers late this year and just finished getting them in the ground last week. Last year some of my tubers didn't get in the ground till mid July. I still got blooms off of most of them, just not as many and not until September. All of them developed additional tubers, so I am able to see if they do better this year.
Since you have a green house and are growing them in containers, you can always move them inside when the early frosts hit. Seems a no brainer to me.
You can buy 'bulb and bloom' food and the best ratios for dahlias generally run 4-9-9 or 5-10-10, which simply means more good stuff for the blooms and buds than for the plant. But the actual growing area, location and space can produce tremendous disparities in color. My Fire Magic is currently blooming and is a vibrant reddish color - not even close to the 'fuschia' color in the Swan catalog much less what other on line vendors show for FM. Add in your particular sun variances (4 hrs, 6hrs or 8 or more hrs) and you may get unusual colors as well.
But then I live in SF where the fog usually blankets the area from late May to Sept and colors don't get washed out. However, that said, this year we have had a tremendously sunny Spring and one of my Patty Cake blooms opened and wilted within 4 days due to the sun it got. Same with my Neon Splendor - it opened that gorgeous orange shading and wilted within 4 days! Normally they stay bright for weeks.
So you can only use photos as guidelines - even the Swan Island catalog tells you the actual plant color may look different from their catalog due to the type of paper and inks used by the printers.
But Steve and Highlander are correct too. You would be amazed at how different the same dahlias look if you only look at photos. Steve is correct - many growers take pics in mid day and the colors are all washed out. The combination of different inks and time of day the pic is taken can play havoc on what you actually get.
I guess they could be from seed, I just assumed cutting because they were already flowering. Either way I only have prior experience with tubers. I planted them almost 2 weeks ago. A few of them actually had nice tubers forming when I planted them. Basically they were just leftover dahlias that I didn't have the heart to throw out so I planted them quickly where I had space. I went on vacation last week and didn't have anyone to care for the pots (small 4" and 6" pots) while I was away so I stuck them in the ground. I actually have a few of my favorite ones from the bunch in large pots in a part shade situation and they are thriving.
Since they were just planted 2 weeks ago, I think it is just your weather and lack of water.
On another note, I got great tubers from "Figaro" and saved them for several years. I was told it wasn't worth the trouble, but since all I did was pull them up, throw them in a paper bag in a plastic bag and toss them in the garage, it was no trouble. But even if it had been trouble, it would have been worth it. Absolutely stunning plants from tubers rather than seed...might not make a difference in another area, but with our short growing season the plants were definitely fuller from tubers.