My dahlias bring me enormous pleasure. With their cheery colours and variety of shapes, the flowers always make me smile. They have only another six weeks or so before the first frost will end their season so I am cutting flowers regularly to encourage more buds.
Las year, I bought and planted seven tubers to add to the eight I planted the year before. It’s low-volume planting, I know, but I have made a limited space available to them. Perhaps I’ll expand that in November?
The plants had a challenging season this time. We had a lot of rain and not as much sun as we usually get in summer. Some tubers simply failed to shoot. It’s dispiriting and a waste of money when this happens. I suspected that stock from some suppliers were more reliable than others so I made a record of which ones flowered and which ones failed.
Over the past two years, I have ordered tubers from three different suppliers. Of four tubers I ordered from a single supplier last year, not one of them sent up shoots. I’ll dig them up to see what state they are in but I won’t be ordering from that supplier again. It’s disappointing because I had carefully selected some pretty ones from them.
All the other tubers were reliable so the other two suppliers will be getting my business later this year. Let’s hope they offer the colours and types I want!
Wow! so beautiful!