Don't pooh-pooh Pooh!

Pooh was a star--bright orange, good for cutting and bouquets and prolific-with a good tuber harvest.

2011 Harvest

From November 14th to the 21st--in 8 days I harvested all my 45 of my plants (48 were planted 2 0f mine died off early on-reasons unknown-1 new tuber a specialty Orchid never came up which makes me extremely grouchy). 3 Clifton Lela plants yielded 14 tubers. 4 Allie White plants yielded 10 tubers. 4 Tioga Dawn plants yielded 20 tubers. 3 Ruby Viola plants yielded 12 tubers. 3 Aitara Diadem plants yielded 5 tubers. 3 Colorado Classic plants yielded 23 tubers. 4 Korb Impeccable Dream plants yielded 13 tubers. 4 Kalista Angel plants yielded 12 tubers. 1 Sorbet plant yielded 4 tubers. 1 Pink Splendor plant yielded 4 tubers. 1 Granny Naman plant yielded 7 tubers. 1 Normandy Wild Willie yielded 6 tubers. 2 Alpen Pearl plants yielded 3 tubers. 1 Tapestry plant yielded 5 tubers. 3 Pooh plants yielded 17 tubers. 2 Stella J plants yielded 8 tubers. 1 Verona's Marmalade yielded 0 tubers. 1 Marie Schnugg plant yielded 8 tubers. 5 Topmix Yellow plants yielded 12 tubers. 1 Clifton Zack plant yielded 5 tubers. Total tubers for 2012 Season will be 184 plus some new arrivals to be delivered in the Spring. I'll make some comments and observations about this year's harvest in the next blogg.

Thumbs Down

Colorado classic is large (6-8") and looks like a loosely, pinkish, feathered pompom ball-sounds good. But, these heavy blooms are attached to the plant by thin, longish stems that eventually can't support them. Probably, 90% of the blooms will break over. One plus is that, though they make a poor bouquet flower, when they are heads down their petticoats show!

Also, Marie Schnugg is exotically attractive, but is a poor team player in a bouquet, because within 24 hours it will start bailing petals in protest.

Second year with Sorbet and again stingy with flower production and plant growth. One more year to shape up or ship out.

That's it until the late bloomers show their faces!

Still more 2011!

More 2011 Dalias

5 varieties of 2011 Dahlias

The Big Sleep

This year I left plenty of stem on each tuber--truthfully, I still found it difficult to identify the "eyes" so, I was much more generous with the dividing process. Many of them looked blind, but it pays to adhere to the old hymn, "I once was blind, but now I see". So, everybody got a chance to "see".

I learned about the Ink In a Bottle pencil--the best marking tool for labeling each tuber with it's varietal name--sure beats marks-a-lot pens that blur.

Finally, each tuber was sulfur dusted (wetable).

My Dahlia friends, also, helped me with ideas to store the tubers more efficiently. I purchased (something like) 12"x14"x9"deep plastic file boxes; I needed 4 of them. Using perlite for medium, I layered single varieties of tubers with medium separated by newspaper or paper bags--both bags and newspaper worked equally well. On each box I listed each layered variety of tubers in order.

Then, this year, I stacked and stored the boxes in the front hall closet. When we had the garage remodled into an entry way, we didn't have the closet insulated. On an outside wall, it stays quite cool in there during the winter in Oregon, but won't freeze. Turned out to be a perfect and convenient place to store the tubers for the big sleep.

The learning curve

Not sure where I am on the learning curve; I can only hope centrifugal force hasn't thrown me to far off from where I need to be.

It's been a long time since my last post and a lot has happened. I'll enter a bit at a time until I get caught up.

The Roseburg Dahlia Club members have donr much to save me from myself. I got hands on advise on how not to behead my 2010 crop of tubers.

This year I added some new storage techniques that worked very well.