About dahlia tubers

Yesterday, at the close of a satisfying afternoon clean-up in the perennial rows and organization of the downstairs room where I grow the plant starts and do the design work, I was out with the last wheelbarrow full of stuff for composting when a delivery truck pulled up. The order of dahlia tubers I half-wished I hadn’t placed had arrived.

Up until six years ago, dahlia tubers and the growing of dahlias were utterly foreign to me. No one in my family that I knew of had ever grown them—none of my grandparents, not my parents, no aunts or uncles or cousins. I think they were out of fashion when I was growing up and came around again when I was in my 40s and got the attention of the wedding industry and the magazines that covered it. By the time I decided to go at growing commercially part-time in 2015, there was no question I’d try them. Let me share my experience with tubers (if you want to just skip to the end to just read my list of favorite varieties, do).

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This order of tubers is one of the worst I’ve ever gotten. They are Dutch tubers, which come as whole clumps, unlike the ones you get from American growers, who divide the clumps into individual tubers that definitely will have at least one growing eye from which the plant will sprout. But international shipping is hard on tubers; it would be impractical to divide them and take a chance on them coming in broken and entirely lost. I must trim off all the broken material from the central part of the clump and compost the trimmings.

This particular shipment was the driest batch of tubers I’ve ever received, save for one unusual experience with an American grower I’ll never by from again. In the bags that were set into the crates, the tubers were crammed together with no packing material to speak of, no peat moss or anything to hold in any moisture. The ‘Rip City’ tubers were shriveled a bit, and tomorrow when I go through them I’ll decide whether I need to ask for a refund. The others—the ‘Café au Lait and the ‘Cornel Bronze’—should make it. I will put them all back into their bags after I trim, but the bags will be filled with coarse vermiculite to hold in all the moisture left in the tubers and keep them safe until I plant them in early May (with the help of a crew).

Part of the reason for the condition of these, I know, is that the international floral trade has been through a lot in the past year. I would not be surprised if these tubers actually were dug up in fall of 2019 and have been sitting all this time. (But I can’t say I know.)

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American tubers always come in better shape (with a far shorter trip to make). I only buy Dutch tubers when I want to make certain I can get a full crate of a particular variety. I can’t guarantee getting a full crate from American growers.

The best way to go, I think, is to buy American tubers and make sure you’re set up to sprout and take cuttings of these and have your outside planting area set up well ahead of time. I have not done this because I have not made it a priority to have a ready buyer specifically for dahlia blooms and then set myself up well to do this.

I grow dahlias because I’m mesmerized by them. But I am afraid to count on them. The blooming season is short—less than two months. And there are the cucumber beetles to deal with. I go up and down the rows and put organza bags over maturing buds, which is absurd, so they will be protected from the beetles as they open. And I am not willing to invest in a hoophouse just for dahlias. My operation is too small.

Instead of banking on dahlias, I put my trust into diversifying my crops and the standard flowers I know I can count on: zinnias, celosia, herbs, perennials. Cool-season annuals.

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You will never, ever get a better tuber than the ones you get from Swan Island Dahlias in Oregon. Never. They cost more than tubers elsewhere, but they are absolutely worth it, thick and fat and plump as potatoes and ready to pump out cuttings then go into the ground and make a big plant that makes more tubers that you dig up in the fall. Really, I’d have been better off buying a dozen ‘Café au Lait’ at Swan Island’s retail price and taking cuttings from them and putting them into a properly prepared bed in a hoophouse than buying the crate of Dutch tubers that came today. And yet I keep experimenting with dahlias, losing money and time on them, learning about them (the only way to really learn about growing is to do it).

Other American growers sell very good tubers, too, and have some of the more unusual varieties that Swan Island doesn’t. I have bought tubers from Summer Dreams Farm in Michigan and Triple Wren Farm in Washington State and have been very happy.

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But I am already pretty clear that even if I get a hoophouse I will not try to put too much of my resources into dahlias. They are very hungry plants and want your richest beds of compost and leaf mold and other organic matter. And we are right on the border of being able to overwinter them here, so the plants almost certainly must be lifted every November and stored again until the end of April then planted again. And divided somewhere in between. (But if you have a hoophouse you could safely overwinter them here, especially if you cover the beds heavily with organic matter and a silage tarp.)

The dahlias require so much in proportion to what they give that for me they absolutely are not worth the work, and this was clear to me after two seasons of growing them. The money in dahlias is in the selling of tubers, and I am not interested in dividing tubers and selling them and building a business on that. That is not where the magic lies for me.

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It is embarrassing to admit that I have had hundreds of free dahlias tubers given to me by Floret and not saved many of them because of the overwhelm. When the company was getting ready to get out of selling tubers, they sent a countless number to a list of growers, and I was on it. One day, here comes an Instagram message from Erin B. saying she had lots of extras and would love to share. “How many can you take?” she asked. I could not justifiably take more than 500. I could have had 2,000 (she wouldn’t even let me pay shipping). And really I should have declined: We were building the house and moving, and I had 13 weddings and could not take care of everything properly. But I took them and was able to try varieties new to me, and what I learned was valuable. And they sent me more last year. I think dahlia tubers overwhelm us all.

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And, wow, the flowers are lovely. Charismatic. For at least a couple of years I have known that I wanted to boil down the number of varieties I grow and focus on those and do a limited planting of them and do it all properly. This is where my list stands now:

‘Café au Lait’—Half the blooms are purple-tinged, but when those blushy flowers come, they are impressive.

‘Cornel Bronze’—The plants are productive, the quasi-apricot color is versatile and useful, as is the medium size, and the petal shape resists cucumber beetle damage. Probably my favorite.

‘Karma Choc’—I love the deep dark red, though I think it is not quite as popular as it was even a couple of years ago. This variety is reliable and productive, a lovely waterlily type.

‘Sweet Nathalie’—A far more reliable stand-in for the Cafés; the plants are productive and don’t require so much feeding, and the petal shape is more resistant to beetle damage. Utterly pretty.

‘Lights Out’ or ‘Black Satin’—These two smaller black varieties are productive and useful. And fascinating.

If I continued to narrow this down, I think it would be ‘Cornel Bronze’ and ‘Sweet Natalie’ and that would be all I needed for what I do.