Daring to plant some dahlias
Despite the changeable weather, I’m pressing on with my plans!
When it comes to overwintering tender plants, all the recent chilly weather has disrupted my best-laid plans. I started out with brave intentions. Weather patterns are changing and my sheltered urban garden benefits from the heat-island effect. Plus, very often, it’s winter wet that causes fatalities rather than cold.
The succulents could stay on the windowsill, I thought, and I left the dahlias outside in a sheltered spot. Insulated, as they were, in decent-sized pots of free-draining compost, the logic was that as long as the temperatures didn’t dip too sharply, they would probably be fine. The trouble is, the temperatures dipped very sharply indeed! And this saw me out in the freezing garden, in the dark, frantically fishing tubers out of pots and bringing them inside.
Under the circumstances, it seems a little presumptuous to suggest that winter is behind us, or issue platitudes about icy blasts being a distant memory! Yet the growing season rolls on, so I’m now busily preparing the hastily displaced dahlias for spring. I’m also looking forward to some exciting plants from www. woolmans.com – dahlia ‘Crème de Cassis’ with its sumptuous bicolour flowers, hot pink ‘Bishop of Canterbury’, red ‘Arabian Night’ and ‘David Howard’, which has decorative orange blooms. These will all be planted into fairly shallow containers and watered sparingly while they get going. As they grow I’ll pot them up and continue to water and feed them with plenty of nitrogen early in the season. As we get towards summer, I’ll swap to a high potash fertiliser to promote flowering. And if they do really well, I might even take a few cuttings! The shorter plants will eventually go into nice big containers and the taller ones I’ll find room for in the borders. But since some of these borders are still something of a twinkle in my eye – and to be honest I’m not completely convinced that the winter has entirely done with us yet – the tubers are back in their sheltered spot where I can whip them back inside if necessary. But given that they’ve made it thus far and are still alive, I’ve high hopes for a glorious summer display!