Gardeners' Chat

[MmePoppySeedDefage]

Chat. For gardeners. About gardening, but we can go off piste and chat about things like non-gardening clothes, or food or whatever, without being told off

I grew some dwarf mix dahlias from seed. They were doing quite well until they got annihilated by slugs when the weather changed in July and I was on holiday. I came home to bare stems 😔 Anyway some succumbed but others are now looking quite healthy, no flowers though. Does anyone know what I should do with them over winter? Store them in their pots or will they have a tuber that I should unearth? Or just compost 'em?

I used to leave my dahlias in the ground, but was living in quite a dry area at the time. I think the recommendation is to store them in a bit of compost somewhere dry and frost free.

We live in The North (so to speak) and DH does our dahlias according to FiL's method.

IIRC this involves (1) waiting until first frost (2) cut off stems (3) lift tubers and remove soil (4) wrap tubers in newspaper or paper bags (5) store somewhere frost-free over winter.

I store mine in their pots, less hassle

That does sound much easier

But I let DH crack on, he seems to enjoy his little project

To be fair, he does also then use the liberated pots for planting up a big display of bulbs.

We find (anybody else?) that tulips in particular only flower reliably once, so if we want a good container display we have to put in new bulbs every autumn. The old bulbs aren't wasted though, we plant them all into the actual garden beds and take it as a bonus if they re-flower.

Do you store them as they are, in their compost-filled pots in a frost-free place, or do you mean you lift ‘em and store them in dry empty pots?

I received 15 dahlia tubers (£1 each, big fat juicy ones) in July, didn’t pot ‘em up until 3-4 weeks later, and now they’re all in fine leaf, flower heads coming… just in time for the first frosts, so I doubt they’ll manage to flower.

I love dahlias but almost never get round to lifting and storing them over winter, I must do better this year (and pot them up early next year)!

I've concluded that storing in pots in their compost is the way to go. I have a couple planted in the garden that I grew from seed, and they seem to survive in the garage, still with bits of soil on.

I live in the northwest and it rains nonstop - I have to lift dahlias or they just rot. I’m not too precious about them though, wrapped in newspaper or buried in old compost works fine

I pick up the pots, stand them in an unheated greenhouse, let them die down naturally and come back into growth naturally the following year. If I'm feeling particularly energetic I may shange some of the soil or scatter some slow release fertiliser when they come back into growth. I'm not necessarily recommending this, but they grow and flower.

I did a thing one year where I filled pots with compost and then upended them over the dahlia stumps, so it looked compost sand castles. Not my choice, I was asked to do it, but it did work. Personally I go for lifting and storing over winter.

The Mumsnet gardening section has gone a bit weird on my iPad so I lost this lovely thread. I’d planned to spend the day weeding and tidying up but the weather is just dismal today. I’ve had no time to spend in the garden for the last few weeks apart from mowing (hopefully the last of the year now).

Going to spend the winter planning what to do with our front garden which is a 15x25 foot rectangle of lawn with a tree stump in the middle. I’m fed up of lugging the mower round and the tree is a small weeping cherry which DH hated and is half way through getting rid of.

A friend of mine turned her whole (back) lawn into a giant flower bed, it looks amazing, some random stones making paths through it. It absorbs all the rain that a lawn would, maybe more, so is much more climate-friendly than paving the whole damn thing would be.

I’m thinking something like that Mavis I’m always complaining we don’t have enough planting space.

Do it! Never need to mow the grass again.

We converted our front lawn to meadow. Strim once in October, mow once in early Jan ready for the bulbs to come through. No other maintenance.

The Mumsnet gardening section has gone a bit weird on my iPad so I lost this lovely thread. Do you mean the new view they’re trialling? - where they show the first post, and only about 3 threads per screen? Look for a sort of double rectangle in black on the R above the first post - it lets you change back to a proper view

I have let a lawn meadow itself in this way. A disadvantage, though, is that I have a nearby massive hedge with a lot of blackthorn and this is beginning to establish itself in the lawn. I have another area I took my eye off for a minute (ish) and it's now basically a blackthorn forest. I cut the lawn meadow about two weeks ago and now it's harder to spot the baby blackthorns, which I think are establishing themselves evilly under the ground. Even the tiny ones are almost impossible to dig out.

@MereDintofPandiculation yes! Is that what it is? It seemed to have disappeared from Threads I’m on too.
The meadows sound lovely but I think I’d like some kind of deep border. I’ve got a few months to think about it.

I use the iPad app (unless I need one of the functions it doesn't support), I find it a lot easier to read than in the browser - no problems at the moment.

I use an iPad too, and generally like it - but we can't edit on the app can we?

I often use the app, and there's no edit function on there yet.

No, nor quote a quote or DM. Probably some other useful things. But it's easy enough to get a link to the post and dump it into safari IME.

Possibly this should really be in share the unexciting news in Chat, but I'm inordinately thrilled so it's going here. Pea straw by the the bale, i.e. how it drops out of the baler has become like hens' teeth in Melbourne. The plastic-wrapped stuff is readily available and bloody useless as it's more or less dust instead of the loose, straw-like baled variety.

I use it for my veggie beds and it's perfect, open, airy, lets the water in but still still proper mulch. I finally tracked it down at a very old-school produce supplier where all the other customers were aged Greek men which is entirely what I expected. There was nothing commercially packed, all weighed out in individual plastic bags. All the plants on sale were veggies, none of your poncey flowers. It was like going back in time. All transactions were conducted in Greek and took forever as I also expected, except for me naturally. I'm so happy, the bale will last two years.

Now I have to clean out the car boot which has a good deal of very tenacious pea straw strands all over it.

@echt I get it, when I found a local stud with a huge well rotted manure pile that you could drive right up to and just help yourself I was thrilled. I got bags and bags of it and kept going into the garden just to look at it. Never thought poo could make me so happy.

And the thing that gets me is that on Fridays nights, Gardening Australia, the equivalent of Gardeners' World, but covering a continent, every every time you see a veggie patch being mulched, it's baled pea straw, but buying it is difficult. Still, I've got my source, and it'll be cold day in Hell that the Greek veggie gardeners of Oakleigh give this one up.