Kellymack,

What you really want to know is not when a variety flowers, but how long a variety takes to bloom. Then, with that knowledge in hand, you start varieties that take longer to bloom earlier than the others, and they all end up blooming more or less the same time (its impossible to get it exact, but once they start blooming they aren't going to stop.)

I have numbers on my 40+ varieties I grew this year, and have worked out rough starting times for each variety to get them to all be blooming the last week of May 2009. For my varieties, the earliest date is November 24, 2008 and the latest is March 20, 2009.

I've never found a lit of bloom times. Swan indicates some as "early bloomers" and others as "late bloomers," and presumably everything else is average. 2 years ago when I first planted dahlias, my "early bloomers" came into bloom in mid June, and the "late bloomers" in September.

Best of luck.

Cheers,
Russ

I did not do that with my dahlias ,but I took pictures and the camera soft ware dated the pictures so I have a record any way. Now that I know that I can work out a starting system.