Dahlias. The flowers that just don't give up. Looking for ONE plant that'll provide you with enough cutting flowers for the entire season? Make it dahlias. They bloom from July until you're sick of them.
Last year I planted Dahlias for the first time. I. Had. No. Idea. I wanted a cutting garden and I love flowers that are huge because they're way easier to arrange than a ton of smaller flowers. Also you can wear them as a hat. Or bikini. Dinner plate dahlia heads are as big as peonies. That's pe-o-nies. No one wants a vase full of the other things.
So I special ordered a few varieties of dahlias and planted every single one of them. By the middle of the summer they started to bloom. By the end of the summer I could no longer go to my garden without enabling GPS on my phone, wearing a reflective arm band and donning an emergency whistle around my neck. The Dahlias had taken over and were, on occasion, blamed for the disappearance of several gardening tools. And gardeners.
I quickly realized that there is no bigger bang for your buck than dahlias. One little tuber (that's how you grow dahlias, from tubers) will end up producing a 3-4' high bush covered in sturdy stems of dahlias. The more you cut them off the more they grow. They grow more, you become invaded with dahlias, so you have to cut more just to make a path to your tomatoes. This goes on until the end of September when you finally give up on getting anywhere near the tomatoes, but it doesn't matter because they have blight anyway. The Dahlias on the other hand look as though they've been receiving Vitamin B through an IV drip all summer long.
From July on, I would go to the garden, pick a few vegetables and haul home flowers. The first few weeks were among the most exciting weeks of my life. Free flowers. As many beautiful flowers as I wanted ... for free. I danced among them, clippers in hand, carefully selecting the prettiest blooms to take home and arrange. Occasionally I would give one away to a fellow gardener. But not too many. It was a lot of flowers but I was pretty sure I needed every single one of them for myself.
Skip to the beginning of August when every single dahlia bush is now the size of an ice cream truck.
I cut them as fast as I can dropping them off by the armful to anyone nearby. I invite family members to come up to the garden and take as many as they want. I bring them as gifts, use them as bows on presents, fill every room in my house with them. I even traded one for a Raspberry Basil Paleta at the farmer's market.
I've never arranged so many flowers in my life as I did last summer.
And still the garden is FULL of dahlias. There was the odd zinnia as well. A couple of snapdragons. Most of which were choked out by the steroidal dahlias.
At the end of the summer I had a decision to make. Was there really such a thing as "too much of a good thing". Yup. Yes, there was.
The thing about dahlias is, if you live anywhere below Zone 8, you have to dig the tubers up and store them all winter long. Well, these tubers, being that they're supporting a plant big enough to provide cheer for an entire hospital ward are HUGE. I made a few cuts and kept just my favourites of the 8 or so varieties I grew last year.
To store dahlia tubers you're supposed to place them in bags or boxes of damp sand or peat moss. You want them to stay dry enough that they don't rot but wet enough that they don't entirely shrivel up and die. It's a fine balance.
I threw all of mine into some ripped plastic grocery store bags and hoped for the best. And by best I mean I hoped half of them would die.
All these flower pictures you're seeing by the way are just some of the flowers I picked from August to September. So yeah. A lot of flowers.
Last week I pulled my tubers out of storage and ... because I always have bad luck ... every single one of them lived. I'm planting them for the upcoming season this week.
Here's the fun part. Because I wasn't sure if these dahlias were going to make it through the winter or not I also planted a few flower seeds just in case. Hundreds of them I suppose you would say. Snapdragons, Zinnias, Poppies, Sunflowers, Big Hairy Balls, Cockscomb, a secret flower I can't tell you about yet, Statice, Bupleurum, Sweet Peas, Amaranth ... um, and a few more. Just in case.
Now that they're growing and have become official seedlings it's hard to just throw them out. I'm thinking I'd better plant them all. I'm pretty sure I'll need every single one of them.
Have a good weekend!
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My mom had the greenest of green thumbs and this brought back a lot of memories. She always dug up the dahlias in the fall (northeast Ohio), stored them in the basement, and replanted in the spring. She had some very established hen and chicks, and one grew a rooster that was over a foot tall. She had a lot of other flowers too. So so fragrant roses, front and back yard. When my dad retired he hand dug up a sizable plot in the back and had a wonderful veg garden. If he asked you if you wanted an onion, he meant just that-AN onion. But it would be so big it was really hot! Miss my gardeners. I do a bit of gardening too, but that's another story. Thanks for the butterfly pic! Ev
I am planting dahlias from seed this year (Baker Creek), which they say will develop tubers to overwinter. Crossing fingers because I LOOOOOVE their obnoxious showiness.
I've grown them from seed for several years now. Planted early enough (like last month) they will flower from seed first year. But its a crap shoot on what you get. I keep the ones I like and pull up the others.
Too bad I live in the US. I would take your extra seedlings. Your pictures are amazing. How did you hold out on us till now? I will have to go back through your pics from last year to see how many dahlias I can spot that you didn't mention. My mom used to grow dahlias out in the garden when I was a child (a LONG time ago) so she could go tend them. Actually she was sneaking out to smoke. I wonder where I got my bad habits from? Your dahlias are beautiful. I grew some one year and they were beautiful, but I forgot to dig them in the fall. Oops.
They're a bit of a high maintenance flower but they also give BIG payback. They were planted along the back fence of my garden behind the chairs and strawberry cages. :) ~ karen!
Well crap. I read this post and heard “Kelli, you need to buy these now”. So I did. We will all be drowning in flowers. At least if I die out there in the garden they will have something to put on my grave!
Could you all just please stop! Pretty please? Have you noticed the absence of South Africans commenting on this post?
It is because we are all officially JEALOUS! No rain, just drought here. 3 days of rain in 7 months!
Flowers! Unthinkable! Just one blade of grass would be good.
So one request, if you could all do the Rain Dance, preferably naked, when it rains in your gardens, & spin around & around, (Think Princess Elsa!), & just send it down here, we would all appreciate it!
Karen, they are gorgeous! Tears in my eyes... :(
I actually think about South Africa and your water situation a LOT! I can't even imagine what it would be like. ~ karen!
I feel for you, Lez.
I live not too far from Karen but based on the amount of rain, one would think that she lives in a rainforest jungle and I live in a dessert. And often, when it does rain, it rains extremely little in my area of town while elsewhere it is a real rain.
I read several newspaper articles about South Africa and it was very sad - I had no idea the situation was so critical.
Alena
This Lady's plight just makes me sick to my stomach. Trumparica is now opening its' Geography to drill,mine,log, and kill anything and anywhere that might produce the last nail in the coffin of our planets delicate atmosphere cause of course anybody who has words and is very very smart knows that wealth trumps the fate of this stunningly beautiful planet. Oh and lest I forget-Trophy hunting of Grizzles is now available as a neat passtime cause heaven forfend that the doozie brothers might have to go to a pet farm to kill large tame predators.
Canada?????got any suggestions for Trumpairica because I just watch the news with tears running down this 78 year old face. I feel like a person mesmerized by a swaying Cobra. I apologize for the politics but I know,Karen can fix anything and youse guys is definitely smarter than we are..I hope...?
We are plummeting to a very very dire conclusion and we are are standing still staring into the oncoming headlights. There are those-of course-who look forward to wall building?
Lovely pictures Karen. Where did you order your tubers from?
These particular ones were from Veseys. :) ~ karen!
Well now you've done it. I didn't even make it to the bottom of your post before I spun off and ordered $40 worth of dahlias for my cutting garden. This year I am devoting a raised bed just to cutting flowers.
LOL. That's O.K. I ordered more myself yesterday! ~ karen
Double bonus - looks like the butterflies were very happy with your misfortune!
May have to try some this year ..
Plus I just ordered MORE for outside my picket fence, lol. Border ones that don't get as tall. I have issues. ;) ~ karen!
Yes! Me too ! Being the shortest in a family of giants can tend to do that to a person ..I’m going to have a look.
my cutting garden has grown considerably in the last few years. Not sure I can even name all the things I am growing this year.
achillea or yarrow-at least 3 kinds
Aquillegia or columbines
crocrosmia
dutch iris
cosmos-every variety known to man
zinnia-again at least 10 varietes
curcurma-a new summer bulb that is just a wonderful cut flower
lisianthus
tansy-2 kinds
dahlias-although I can't say I have as good of luck with them
shasta daisies-4 varieties
Bells of Ireland
asclepsia or butterfly weed
3 or 4 kinds of filler type plants
gomphrena-2 colors so far, want at least 1 more color
verbena bonairiensis
alliums
penstemons
angelica
phlomis
tall cutting ageratum
and many many more.
Flowers may or may not be edible. But they feed the soul and that is just as important as feeding out stomachs
I love Bells of Ireland and really REALLY love lisianthus. I haven't seen the tall ageratum, but I'd love to grow that. The regular is too short for cutting. ~ karen!
"But they feed the soul and that is just as important as feeding out stomachs" echos my sentiments exactly!
Ha! Ha! Ha! Your post really made me laugh out loud! I know just what you mean about having too many flowers, and made the same mistake as you, but with Marigolds. I bought one packet of seeds which had four different varieties of Marigold, ranging in size from the traditional small about 6 inches, to 4 feet high, and every one of the darned seeds grew!! At least with Dahlias you have a range of different colours, but my goodness, by the end of summer I was SO sick of orange/yellow marigolds, and have never planted them again!
Meanwhile, loving your posts and your flowers.
Keep on growing!
Judi in the UK
Thanks Judi! The Dahlias are great but even though I had different colours it was still alllll the same flower. So I vowed to get rid of some to make room for other things that weren't dahlias! No marigolds though. ;) ~ karen
Quite beautiful! This year I am planting my first bee and butterfly garden. Just a tiny little triangle area in the back yard. Last year I harvested a bunch of milkweed pods from down by the river where I go birding and have a bunch of packets of wild flower seed mix. Then a friend gave me several seeds from her giant sunflowers. I am not a gardener so I want as little to do with tending it as possible. The wildflower seeds were also given to me free and my hopes are that they will cover the area so you can not see all the weeds that I know I will never pull out.
That's great! You'll love seeing the bees and butterflies. One word of warning about sunflowers. The giant varieties get HUGE (as I'm sure you know) which makes them a pain to take out at the end of the season. It's like removing a tree. This year I'm going to pinch back my sunflowers so they don't get as massive. ~ karen!
I'm trying the Maximilian sunflowers this year. I'm really intrigued by them partly because they are perennial (yay!) and they have masses of smaller flowers all along the stem.
I had tons of dahlias and killed them all by storing them and having them rot. I like the idea of leaving them in the ground. Southern Va is a good place to try them out again. Thanks.
Lol-ed at the “official seedlings” part....my downfall every year. How can you throw the extras out? 😅
Can you share which varieties made the cut? Every time I look through Swan Island’s catalog I’m overwhelmed by the choices.
It really depends on what colours you're looking for. I wanted to go with slightly muted colours. I also found the spider varieties always looked a bit sickly so I eliminated all of those. Ditto for the Obsidian Dahlia, which I loved but only 1 of every 25 or so of them produced a perfect flower. I kept Zorro, Hot Fudge Caramel, Ice Cube and After Dusk. ~ karen!
My daughter used to make her pocket money by selling dahlias from a little stand at the end of our driveway. I think she made something like $600 one year when she was about 10! In our zone 9 (West Coast) we found the best way to overwinter them was to leave them in the ground and bury them in fallen leaves and extra dirt (about a foot deep). Early spring we unbury them and let them go their crazy way. We have just moved from that location but we dug them up, split some tubers off for our new place and left loads for the new owners as a lovely surprise!
Ha! So glad you have joined the Dahlia Club. My goodness they are my favourite jungle plant. And you are right - ridiculous glut of colour. I'd send you pictures but you don't need to see any more!
I lifted mine the first year and they all rotted. So even though I get heavy snow and cold and wet. I leave them in the ground. I just mulch really really thickly with a bucket of bark chippings and they come through the winter. No need to fuss at all.
I can't get over the size of each plant. I'd like to have a larger variety of them but each plant is so big! ~ karen!
I grew a bunch of different varieties one year and I had huge yellow ones with blooms that were 12" across. I could do a bouquet in my biggest jug with 3 blooms. LOL.
For many years our next door neighbour was developing new breeds of dahlias in his garden. Picture a 1/3 acre urban lot with multiple testing beds. The first year or so we were here he confined them to the back yard but soon he had ploughed up the front lawn and added another 50’ x 30’ bed of rows of dahlias. At the beginning of the spring he would make the rows of hills and place the stakes before planting the tubers - it always looked like a giant weaving project until the plants obscured the stakes - then it resembled a forest of pot plants or tomato plants until it flowered. Then, however, it was a tourist attraction! Simply glorious for weeks! He has a number of introduced varieties (any dahlia named Hy-whatever is his.) People still ask about the man who grew the flowers - he moved to the Okanagan to grow wine grapes instead.
Interesting! I'll keep an eye out for any Hy Dahlias. They do look great once they're blooming and they bloom forever! ~ karen
Will they grow in Florida?
I'm not sure what zone you're in in Florida. In fact, I have no idea. BUT dahlias can grow anywhere from zone 5-11. From 5-7 you have to dig up the dahlias. Anything above zone 8 and you can leave them in the ground. I imagine like anything in Florida you just have to be careful about making sure they have adequate water to compensate for the heat. Maybe even some afternoon shade for them. ~ karen!
I'm in 9b, whatever that means, in California, and they grow fine. And I dug 'em up anyway this last winter, because I'm paranoid, and I've never had any success with dahlia's because I didn't actually research what I was supposed to do. I have researched this year, and I can only hope I have the same horrible luck you had with your dahlia's, as they're my favorite flower and I'm desperate.
Great post! I must try some too.