I can’t believe it’s already October, I thought our Indian summer would last forever. But alas, the sun is going down earlier every day. With less hours of sun each day, the plants are growing more slowly.
This has been a year of rebuilding for me. I lost nearly all of my dahlias last year - I left them in the ground because I was not in good health last fall and couldn’t pull them up. That on top of the week of 14-degree weather did them in. I tried hard to see this as an opportunity to upgrade my flowers, to make them better, more “cut flower” friendly varieties - and I’ve got some beauties in there. For the most part, I only purchased 2 tubers for each dahlia - using this year as an experiment.
Dahlias will literally get voted off the island if they are too short, have weak stems, don’t produce enough, or fail to ever bloom in the first place - there are dahlias in each of these categories. The last few weeks my phone is full of pictures and notations of height, bloom size, and whether it’s a keeper or a goner. Below are some examples:
KEEPERS: Here are a few I plan on keeping and expanding in my garden:
