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7 Best Tips for Growing Dahlias | Melissa J. Will

Here's an excerpt:

Melissa gathered these tips for growing dahlias from numerous sources including books, research papers, my own experience, and advice from professional growers whose livelihood depends on their success.

Melissa provides seven top tips and answered Frequently Asked Questions for an excellent overview of everything needed to grow dahlias.

• Dahlias take 90 to 120 days to flower after planting, depending on the variety you are growing.
• Generally, the larger the plant and flowers, the longer it takes.
• If you want flowers before late summer, consider starting your dahlia tubers indoors in pots 4 to 6 weeks before last frost.
• Pinching back (the same as cutting off) the main stem encourages the plant to become bushier.
• Every enthusiastic dahlia grower will tell you their storage method works like a charm. And—they are right—for their specific conditions. The point is, it’s the health of the tuber and the overall environment that counts.
• The optimum storage temperature is 40-45°F (4-7°C). We run into problems when the heating systems in our homes make the humidity level too low for the tubers.
• Consider using the plastic food wrap method where each tuber is wrapped individually to keep moisture in. Growers who use this method report a higher number of viable tubers each spring.
• Exposure to some cold is necessary for their development each year so we wait until early frosts have blackened the foliage before digging up the tubers and storing them for the winter.
• Come spring, a handy rule is, if it’s the right time to plant tomatoes, it’s the right time to plant dahlias.
• On a brighter note, while not entirely deer-proof, dahlias are not their first food choice when other plants are available.

Botanical History On This Day

1803 Joseph Paxton, gardener-architect of Chatsworth and designer of the Crystal Palace, whose greenhouse genius also gave us the Cavendish banana.

1806 Michel Adanson, the natural-system visionary behind Familles des Plantes and namesake of the baobab genus Adansonia, died.

1877 Louise du Pont Crowninshield, preservationist and the last du Pont to reside at Winterthur, was born—her legacy lives in its splendid gardens.

1945 Alwyn Howard Gentry, towering tropical botanist and Missouri Botanical Garden curator, died in an Ecuador crash after collecting ~70,000 specimens.

1961 Katharine Stuart to Elizabeth Lawrence—a letter of gardens, storms, and hardy cyclamen, written from a Maine season at “sixes and sevens.”

Unearthed Words

National Watermelon Day—verse as juicy as summer. Watermelon poems by Stanton, Bukowski, Simic & more

Grow That Garden Library™

Read The Daily Gardener review of From Garden to Grill by Elizabeth Orsini

Buy the book on Amazon: From Garden to Grill by Elizabeth Orsini

Today's Botanic Spark

1948 Gallant Soldiers—the edible, medicinal weed Galinsoga parviflora, escaped from Kew and rechristened by gardeners as “Soldiers of the Queen.”

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