2023 Field Notes

 
 
 
 

Sown 5/6

5/6 -- Putting Dahlia tubers straight into the ground has only really been moderately successful for me over the last couple of years, so trying something different this year (thanks to Monty Don and Gardener's World for the recommendation!). I bought 10 new tubers, and a bunch of 12 inch pots, and compost, and put those all together and put the pots in the greenhouse. Going to keep them watered and see what happens.

5/28 -- Overall, this experiment has gone very well so far. Each of the ten pots has a happy looking plant in it, some of them coming up on a foot tall! A couple of them also have multiple shoots. Getting prepared to move these into the garden - likely as a whole, I'll try to take the contents of the pot and move that straight into the soil outside. To that end, I started running these outside three days ago, and they all spent their first night outside last night, which was possible on the accelerated schedule thanks to overnight lows higher than what I've been keeping the greenhouse at night.

6/13 -- Found a nice spot in the yard and transplanted these out three days ago. Most of them had nice roots and were pretty easy to transplant, although a couple of them were still fairly small. I like the spot I put these, hopefully they'll do well there.

6/25 -- These look OK with their transplantation but haven't done much growing yet. We'll see how things go!

7/2 -- These are pretty meh on the whole. They're doing OK with the transplant - the plants look OK - but a lot of them haven't done much since they moved in to their new homes. One plant is budding, at least!

8/5 -- Some flowers have arrived over the past couple of weeks. Adding some pictures of them to the side. More do seem to be coming, we'll see what arrives over the next couple of weeks.

8/12 -- More flowers coming. I also individually staked most of these to support those very heavy and large flowers.

8/25 -- Have a bunch of flowers out now, and more on the way. These took a while to get going, but nothing like having an individual flower that's the size of your head!

9/10 -- These are continuing to show up and many look amazing. Today I picked maybe the best individual flower I've ever grown (see the pic to the left).

9/22 -- Still making some amazing flowers, these. Forgot to previously mention that pretty much every one of these is now individually staked, as the flowers were so large they were causing the plants to fold in half.