Is anyone ready to be excited about dahlias yet?

[DesparatePragmatist]

I know the 2024 sparrow has barely farted... but my snowdrops are up, the rhubarb is showing pink buds and it's going to be spriiiiiiiinnng...

So I've put in a (possibly slightly too adrenaline-fueled) order for 8 new dahlias from Sarah R's - mixture of waterlily, pompom and anemone types in the cool white/pink/burgundy range rather than the oranges. And a last minute splurge on a cafe au lait for the fun of it. I know it's weeks till they'll arrive and weeks more till they'll do anything, but.... who's with me?

Good luck to everyone waiting to see if ones left in the ground come good. It's certainly possible - I had one come back every year for about 3 years until a particularly vicious winter got it.

Muckspout that is a gorgeous bouquet

Absolutely nothing showing at all in mine that are in pots. 😩

On the plus side, sunflowers, echyium, cosmos all doing well and will pot on this week if I can.

I actually have a 3” red shoot on one of my dozen pots! Ridiculously delighted 🤩
Forgive me but I have put slug pellets around the pots because, despite being in the greenhouse, I get snails and slugs in there that decimate anything they can find.

hello - I live dahlias . We are planning a big / long raised bed which is in full sun during the day. The only question is can I put something else in the bed to not have empty beds six months of the year?
any thoughts/ combinations?

Growing dahlia in pots is quite successful. I find growing them from seed works best. Last year I grew Figaro from seeds, freeby from a gardening mag, which are the smaller variety of dahlia with small delicate lemon and orange coloured flowers and they were beautiful.

bear in mind the roots are swollen tubers so after 2 flowering seasons they can take up a lot of space in the pot, so it is best to remove and split the tubers and replant the healthiest ones removing any that look shrivelled (desiccated) or rotten (due to excessive watering) to stop the pot getting congested. Once they are pot bound they can be an absolutely nightmare to remove!

Nothing from mine yet. I'm hoping for shoots any day now...

Yes, I've had pots with dahlias in and I really struggled to get the massive tubers out after two years in situ. Took me a couple of days to eventually get it out. Arthritic hands ... 😥

I'd love to grow them in the garden but the one time I did this I lost two of them to slugs/snails and only just managed to save a third one by potting it.

I will probably end up with the ones I have in pots again but I will definitely get them out at the end of the season so I don't wrestle with removing them this year. 🙄🙄

And now the snails and slugs come to feast..

Slimy little bastards.

My old stock all stayed in the beds, we'll see what has survived.

My new dozen or so are potted up in the garden room. (Garden is SUCH a bog, I can't be arsed to up and down to the greenhouse until it dries a bit.) Two of them yet to shoot, but the others are all shooting at different levels.😁

Sowed a load of seeds on Friday too, and some of those peeking up already! Never fails to amaze me how miraculous that feels, and how fast some of them are.

Nematodes!

Waiting on pot dahlias and to see if the peony flowers this year!!

Seeds sewn last week and a few are germinating. The dahlia seeds all germinated first. Bulbs not sprouting yet.

Oh yay!!! hoping for some advice here-

I don't really have a bed to plant them on so was going to do containers/pots.

I asked for some Sarah Raven tubers for my birthday and impulsively bought one of those silver buckets from waitrose.

Pretend I know nothing-what do I do?
Can they live in pots?
Plant now? what if the tulips are now in the pots?

Very excited for my first foray into dahlias!!!!

Ooh hello can I join in ? I love a Dahlia. I have left mine in the ground for the last 5 + years. That really hard frost last May (or year before) killed a couple but we planted replacements, topped them with a load of garden cuttings and we will soon see how they got on.

Well I've got 3 sprouting from 15 so far. Some of the pots have funny little mushrooms that have sprouted in the last few days but they're short lived. I potted them up on 16th March. Now I just need to get them big enough to plant out without worrying about slugs. Oh god, I hope this summer is drier than the last 😭

We'll all have to report back on how well the tubers survived after leaving them in the ground over winter

mine are still asleep in the border. Mind you admittedly I haven't disturbed them under the thick layers of leaves that are covering them. Might be best to let them 'do their thing' as and when they're ready.

There anre some great YouTube videos about dahlias. This is one of my favourites from The Impatient Gardener channel. Drop-dead gorgeous dahlias!

@Shepadoodle The new peat-free compost seems to sprout mushrooms a lot. I've got a couple of big ones growing in my chard trough.

Coming to join the admiration. I set 21 in pots a couple of weeks ago, double last year’s amount.

😍

I can't help but feel that it's going to be weeks and weeks until my clay soil is dry and warm enough to plant out in. It's so waterlogged.

I still have no signs of the dahlias peeping through, all in pots in the garage but I now have a tiny sign of my trailing begonias starting to appear, one pot out of three has signs of life!

Aww, @HazelTheGreenWitch clay soil is really so difficult to work with, isnt it. Waterlogged in winter and rock solid in summer

i had quite a few years of frustration living in the Home Counties, with waterlogged borders. In the end I used to dig holes, fill with decent compost when it was peat based, and leaf mold and plant things like that, and not bother at all trying to dig over the rest of the border, it was just too much like hard work, and disheartening.

Here are a couple of wonderful dahlia videos.

the first is a "swoon" one, by a couple who really take their dahlia seriously - a labour of love.

the second one is by a head gardener at a stately home who gives some really practical advice on dahlia care.

Today has been a dahlia day for me. I fancies creating some colour themes this year, so I bought an orange and a purple/blue collection from Parker's.

Ive also split and potted up some tubers that were lurking in a few pots under the staging in the greenhouse that I forgot I had.

according to the video (in the link above) the advice is to pot up, water once, then leave the tubers without any further water until they have sprouted. Sounds like a plan.

Is that pink one cafe au lait? I had similar last year and it was fabulous!

according to the video (in the link above) the advice is to pot up, water once, then leave the tubers without any further water until they have sprouted. Sounds like a plan.

Blast!! I watered the potted ones a little bit yesterday, hope I've not slowed them down, I'm getting fed up checking to see if anything is happening several times a day.