(Pictures Coming Soon)

Storing

Your Rather Rooted tubers are shipped ready to plant! However, if you are in a colder zone and need to wait a few more weeks until your soil reaches an average of 60, you can store your tubers in the medium they were shipped in. Keep them in moderate temperature, never letting them be exposed to frost or freezing temperatures.

Make sure they do not dry out. Keep the peat at a low moisture level but not dry. Think about when you open a fresh bag of soil and squeeze it—cool to the touch, a bit of dampness, but never dripping water. Tubers can rot if too wet before they develop a healthy root system, and they can dry and shrivel if they do not have enough moisture to maintain their health. It is a balance.

Spacing

There is a lot of variance in spacing your dahlias. Some growers like to give their plants a lot of growing room, and they stick to the general guideline of 18-24” spacing. If you are limited on space and you have good airflow, you can pack your dahlias closer together. We plant ours with 12” spacing between plants.

Planting

Dig a 4”-6” deep hole in your prepared soil. Place your tuber horizontal in the hole with the eye or sprout facing upwards—think: Eye to the Sky. If you received a split clump, place the whole clump in the hole with the sprout facing upwards.

Cover the tuber with moist soil and discontinue watering until the sprout emerges from the soil in a week or two (possibly longer if the tuber is still dormant). The cessation of watering is to prevent rotting the tuber. Until there is a root system, the tuber has everything it needs.

Be patient! Some cultivars sprout and grow faster than others. You want your sprout to have to “work” its way through the soil to find sunlight. As the sprout pushes up, the roots start growing and spreading out. By forcing the tuber sprout to push and grow, multiple nodes remain beneath the soil line which are future tuber growth points.

Once the sprout breaks the soil line, resume watering and treat the plant as you are used to by regular watering, pinching, and fertilizing.

Watering

Dahlias have a shallow root system which means they enjoy pulse watering. An occasional deep watering is great, but if you have irrigation, we find they prefer a 10-minute drip multiple times a day.

We water twice daily at a minimum. We add in a third watering on harvest days and especially hot days.

If you are hand watering, once a day in the early morning or early evening seems to do well. Add in an overhead watering in the heat of the day on hot days.

Pinching

Pinching is when you strategically break off the center growth point. This terminal stop forces the growth points at the lower nodes to grow (this is what you want). Dahlias branch when pinched. This is helpful to encourage more plentiful blooms and to avoid top heavy plants.

The general recommendation is to look for 10-12” of growth before pinching. For larger cultivars AA, A, and BB, we pinch low. After 3-4 nodes or true leaf sets, we pinch. For smaller cultivars, we pinch at 4-5 nodes.

However, if you are growing in a high-moisture region and are prone to powdery mildew, let the base stock get taller (10-12”) before pinching and make sure you strip those bottom leaves to encourage air flow.

While some toss the pinch aside, we love to root those pinches to multiply stock. Give it a try (Guide Coming Soon)!

GUIDES COMING SOON…

-Fertilizing

-Deadheading

-Harvesting Blooms

-Inspecting for Virus and Disease

-Using Beneficial Insects

-Managing Gophers and Voles

-Digging and Dividing

-Storing

-Cuttings