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| I have a dilemma and need advice! I normally start my dahlias indoors in late March or early April, well before planting them outside at the end of May, by which time they are often a foot tall or so. For the tallest ones this is the only way I get much bloom before frost. Those usually start blooming in August or September. The shorter varieties earlier.
This year I bought in March as usual; I keep them on my cool basement floor until I am ready. However, I have not yet started any indoors. Unexpectedly we are having work done in the bedrooms I normally use to start them in. There is no place else for these. (Greedy me, I must have bought 40 or so: I usually fill 2 cards table with pots.) I am in Zone 5. Our frost date is the end of May, but most years we really don’t get frost after now (May 3). If I go ahead and plant them outside now, is the soil still going to be too cool? I went ahead and planted one bag yesterday, that had sprouts about an inch long. If we get a frost warning after they emerge I will throw a tarp over them. I thought I should get advice before doing any more. I could still start the others in paper pots, or soil filled baggies, but that would mean either a cool but sunny basement window (not much advantage there), or outside on the porch/sidewalk/driveway in the daytime, and in the garage at night. The odds of my forgetting to either put them out or take them in consistently are pretty high. |
Follow-Up Postings:
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- Posted by sturgeonguy 5a ON (My Page) on Tue, May 5, 09 at 21:30
| The question really is whether you think you'll get a hard frost (e.g. the moisture in the soil actually freezes to any extent) or not. The tubers will survive in the soil with cool temperatures, just not frost. Remember, they are shallow root plants so you only need to freeze a couple of inches of soil and you'll kill or damage the roots. It would take several weeks of ground frost to kill the tuber (think about what happens at the end of the season.) I too am in Zone 5, and am on the side of a lake (which usually means our temperatures are slightly higher than others) but you are more daring than I. But my reason is that most of mine are 8" tall already and I don't want to have to bother with coverings for frost warnings. Most of my tubers took 15 days to go from nothing to a cuttable sprout. Were they in the ground, that sprout would have had a couple of sets of leaves above the ground and would have been highly susceptible to frost. The up-side of your plan, however, is that even if the above-ground part gets frosted, a root system should get established as well, so a new sprout should come up quickly. Good luck, and let us know how it works out for you. Cheers, |
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