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This will be my third season growing dahlias and this is my first attempt at a cutting bed. I plan to take "pulls" to root separately, so that each individual tuber can give me more than 1 plant.
In Dahlias

This will be my third season growing dahlias and this is my first attempt at a cutting bed. I plan to take “pulls” to root separately, so that each individual tuber can give me more than 1 plant.


I'm just using a 1020 plastic tray filled with moist potting mix. No drainage holes, so I'm being careful with monitoring the soil moisture (not too wet OR too dry).

I used Kristine Albrecht's method of laying tubers in "trenches" with their crowns sticking up. The video can be found here.

And then here is Kristine's video on taking pulls for rooting.

These are only the new dahlias I purchased this year. They're from Home Depot, so they're all imported from Holland/Netherlands and they came with lots of broken necks and some potentially with gall.

The three varieties are Kelvin Floodlight, Creme de Cognac, and (the prettiest dahlia variety I've ever seen and what will probably become my all-time favorite absolutely-gorgeous dahlia) Kogane Fubuki.

I want to have as many of them as I can. I'm planning on upping my hybridization skills this year so I want to have lots of blooms for hand-pollination experiments. I'm also expecting mis-labeled tubers (a typical issue with imports), so hopefully at least one of these turns out to be the dahlia variety I want.

If this cutting-bed method is successful, I will make another cutting bed for my regular tubers (currently in storage), and then I'll also set up one final 1020 tray with seedlings from seeds I've collected.

Wish me luck!

by PopDownBlocker

2 Comments

  1. AutoModerator

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  2. Constant_Quiet

    Good luck! Looks like you’re off to a great start!

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