Gardening
I salt away some of my dahlias over thewinter . I chose the I I want to see to it live the winter , and it ’s now clock time to wake them up from their rest .
This is a jolly straightforward process .
I first mark the tubers for any rot , there was none , they seem to have appreciated being leave in vermiculite . Last year I lost a few smallish chunks of genus Tuber to rot , they were in damp compost over the wintertime .
In possibility , I could just plant them straight out into the garden , in which grammatical case I might have left the tubers in storage till late April . away from want to take cuttings , another reasonableness to avoid planting directly out is that Mr Slug is very partial to a fresh dahlia stem . It ’s well-off to bring off Mr Slug in a greenhouse or similarly shelter environs , so into pots they go .
Where potential I used 3L pots , although some of the onetime tubers are jolly huge , I used buckets for those .
Step 1 – add a layer of compost , an in or two cryptical , enough to suffer the tuber .
Step 2 – pop tuber in pot
pace 3 – backfill the pot , bit by bit tucking the compost in around the dangly flake of tuber .
Do not underwrite the whole genus Tuber , leave the tops showing . One grounds for doing this is to make the new stems more accessible for take cuttings . I found to my cost last year that burying them makes it hard to take a clean cutting .
footprint 4 – water the flowerpot , dampening the compost
Step 5 – cache somewhere sheltered , mine are on the bottom ledge of staging in my unheated nursery .
The compost should be kept moist but not soppy – the tubers do n’t want to be sitting in a big puddle . If I remember rightly from last year , it was two or three weeks before new ontogeny start to egress .
I may have pretermit a illusion in following this process , I suppose I could have divided some of the larger tubers to get more plant life . If I have a chance at the weekend , I might dis - inter one and give it a bash .
I will plant them out in the garden once the danger of freeze has passed , after a suitable period of hardening off .
I ’ll be back shortly with more gardening thingmabob .
