My house is about to be invaded. The first scouts have already gained a foothold in the living room, and reinforcements are mustering their forces in the porch. Yes, the dahlias have arrived.
Those unprepossessing salami tubers in their dusty bags are my late summer and autumn divas, waiting to take centre stage. Not bad for someone who never even used to like dahlias, associating them only with red and yellow horrors in municipal style planting schemes. But with every flower grower I know evangelising on their behalf, over the past 4 years I’ve been turned into…a dahlia grower. Before I fell for them, I used to plant the odd one, just to see what all the fuss was about – but often, they got eaten by slugs or sprouted one flower and then sulked.
I now realised that those ‘sulkers’ would have been prolific, if only I’d removed the dead flowers (or even better, cut them for the vase…but that was in the days before I grew flowers for that reason). I think as a new dahlia planter, I wasn’t entirely sure if the ‘stalk with that bud thing on the end of it’ was a spent flowerhead, or a new flower bud, so didn’t like to chop it, just in case. Not chopping it was my mistake. The plant thought it had done its job as it had reproduced and set seed, so it therefore put its energy into plumping its tubers rather than producing yet more flowers. Haha! That was then. Now my dahlias have to push out flowers as fast as they can, right into the path of my waiting scissors. No worrying now about what’s a spent flower head, because these days flowers are whipped off as soon as they are about three quarters open!
This year I’m growing more of the gorgeous ‘Cafe au Lait’, beloved by summer and autumn brides for wedding flowers, the gorgeously unpredictable ‘Rebecca’s World’, which streaks and splits its colours like raspberry ripple with a mind of its own, the dark & sultry ‘Rip City, and the soft puffball pompoms of ‘Otto’s Thrill’. I think I’d buy them for their names alone….
These are just a few of the varieties which I’m starting to plunge into compost and bring into the warm. Getting them started now means that I’ll have strong, bushy plants which I can use to take cuttings from to multiply my dahlia stocks, and it also means that they will be big enough to fight off the slug attacks when the frosts are over in May and it’s time for them to settle into their places in the garden.
I like it when it is time to start planting again.