Update in The Great Dahlia Experiment 2016-2017

I watched as three hard frosts turned my Dahlias from stately ladies to swampy rags and I lost my nerve. 

I dug up the tubers and they are now upside down, drying out in a cool room. 

I couldn't face losing them. I couldn't face a winter of fretting.....were the tubers slowly rotting underground whilst I watched and wondered?

The Great Dahlia Experiment 2016-2017 is off. Null and void. Maybe 2017-2018 will find me in braver mood, ready to face the winter with carefree abandon. I doubt it though. It's their little faces you see. 

Dahlias become friends. 

 

The Great Dahlia Experiment 12016-17

In one garden I am playing it safe

In another garden I am being very brave. 

I am being especially brave in garden #2 because it is my garden.

My own Dahlia tubers will stay in the ground all winter. 

625kg of horticultural grit arrives on Tuesday. I will mulch the cut flower bed with the grit - this will keep the tubers warmer and aid drainage in the soil. Dahlia tubers will put up with a bit of cold, but cold and wet will result in the tubers rotting and my beautiful Dahlias will not come back next year. 

 

I am hoping that the grit will help in another important way. When the dahlia shoots emerge next year, slugs and snails will be less willing and able to travel over the grit to munch the tasty, fresh growth. 

This will be a risky move. We could, quite conceivably, experience a horribly wet and cold winter. We have already had a couple of heavy frosts. I could lose them all. 

It goes without saying that I really, really hope that I don't! 

 

Less risky is the method that I employ in my client's wonderful garden - garden #1. 

Over the 7 years that I have worked in the garden we have built up quite a considerable collection of Dahlias. 

 

We have the space to store the Dahlia tubers inside, away from the worst of the winter weather and it almost guarantees that we can put those Dahlias back in the ground next summer. 

We dig up the Dahlias after the first frosts. 

 

We make sure that the Dahlias are correctly labelled - either with their botanical name or, if the name has been lost along the way (as can sometimes happen, despite all best laid plans) or the Dahlia has been grown from a seed mix, we label with a flower colour, flower form and an approximate height description. 

The foliage is cut down to about 20cm and then the tuber is stored upside down for a few days thus ensuring that the moisture in the remainder of the stems exits before storage. 

 

 

Next week we will collect up all available storage crates, crack open our vermiculite supplies and tuck the Dahlias away (checking on them and giving them a small sprinkle of water every three weeks to ensure that the tubers do not completely dry out) until mid-spring 2017 when we will say hello to them again, pot them up and watch as they send up new shoots and we can revel in the anticipation of greeting the sumptuous flowers in high summer. 

 

The Dahlia tubers in my own cut flower patch will have to fend for themselves. I will be watching with great interest and with a huge amount of trepidation. Will my tuberous babies reappear or not? 

Here begins the Great Dahlia Experiment of 2016-17. 

Nicola wanted to write......

Nicola wanted to write but didn't know quite where to start. She had read and listened to plenty of interviews with successful authors and knew that if you wanted to write you had to jolly well just get on with it. So, Nicola just got on with it. 

She had huge amounts of bouncing creativity and would feel a great frustration if she came to the end of the day without something tangible, colourful, to show for it. She hoped to plough as much colour and texture into her writing as she ploughed into her gardens. 

Nicola remembered hours of satisfying toil in the libraries of school, college, university. She remembered those who marked her essays and reports praising her imagination and ability to research insightfully. Nicola remembered the English teacher at her all-girls school commenting that if only she put as much effort into her handwriting as she applied to the humour that littered her comprehension homework, that she might well achieve better marks. 

Art was her best subject. At least, Art was the only subject where she was recognised as very talented. Nicola could draw, she could capture likeness and form and had a sharp eye for colours. Art was her future (it must be a relief for a teacher to see an obvious exit point for teenager approaching the end of school) and she was steered towards, pigeonholed and shown the correct corridor along which she was to travel. But she was abandoned somewhere along that corridor and she had not the maturity to steer herself. She was left disillusioned by the art world. Failing to find a mentor, a path or a vocation within the subject. 

Horticulture rescued her. Gardening gave her the daily challenge she needed. It was her creative release, therapy and, as the years went by, it gave her an authority. She put in those 10,000 hours and became an expert (as much as you can ever be an expert in horticulture ~ 10,000 years would not be enough) but still she wanted to write. 

She wrote delightful Thank You letters to family and friends; she wrote her blog. She read countless novels spanning several genres (apart from sci-fi - she had no time for sci-fi) and encouraged her children to take as much pleasure from reading and writing as she did. 

And then it boiled down to making decisions. Nicola never really was a great one for making decisions, especially those perceived as important decisions. 

Fact or fiction?

Nicola decided that she must just write. She must write as frequently as possible. She must publish her intentions on her website and once her intentions were out there she would have to keep on writing. 

Nicola hoped to get better and better 

...........