The amazing thing about dahlias is the various ways you can propagate them. The most interesting is starting from seed. You won’t get a clone of the seed parent, that’s for sure, so it’s a surprise and a gamble. What you will get is a new flower that has never existed before.
Dahlias grown from seed are how new varieties are created. Saved seeds are started in late winter, and they can grow into a whole new dahlia plant that will also create tubers of its own in the fall. Every year, new varieties appear in gardens around the world. Only a very small percentage are “keepers.”
I’m not yet hand-pollinating my dahlias and covering them with organza bags - that’s a pretty specific and time-consuming hybridizing effort. But I do keep my dahlia plants separate - the seedling patch is about 250 feet away from the double flowers in my cutting garden. The reason for this is that dahlia seedlings have a high likelihood to be single flowers - that’s just how the genetic lottery works. I keep the singles away from the doubles in the cutting garden, so after the bees pollinate and I collect seed from the cutting garden, there is more of a chance these seeds will produce double blooms - but of course, it’s not guaranteed.
This year, I was a bit more organized, and I collected and labeled the seed by the flower parent they came from - so I have quite a collection of “named parent” seeds that I will be starting. Some I’m looking forward to are the Bloomquist varieties, a couple of River’s varieties, Yvonne (a waterlily), and many more!
The trick to germinating dahlia seeds is using the wet paper towel method. This way, you don’t waste cells and seedling mix planting seeds that may or may not make it. My seeds have about an 80% germination rate, so it makes sense to use a method of guaranteed germination. I suppose you could plant two seeds per cell and snip off one of them too - keep the strongest.
