Naomi Slade keeps her dahlias cosy with snuggly woolly mulch!
Woolly mulch will hopefully be the snuggly saviour for my dahlias
To lift or not to lift? That’s always the question with dahlias and other tender tubers at this time of year. And it’s certainly exercising the mind!
Dahlias like good drainage and it’s very often persistent wet that kills them, rather than actual cold. But I’ve made so many changes and winters are so variable, that even in my own garden I’m not completely certain of the conditions my plants will face.
And while quite a lot of them are in pots, I’d like to leave those in the ground in situ to reduce maintenance. It might work; in the central bed, at least, the soil tends to be quite dry as I added loads of fairly coarse compost when I created it. Yet I suspect that the tubers aren’t yet deep enough for the crowns to be frost-free. I also have a suspicion that slugs might sneak in and chomp the emerging shoots in spring - but then again, gardening is an ongoing experiment and it doesn’t hurt to try! So what's called for is some lovely, snuggly winter protection, and I've found a rather splendid solution in the form of woolly mulch from Chimney Sheep (www.chimneysheep. co.uk). This is a sort of felted mat made of sheep’s wool that you lay on top of the
soil like a blanket. It’s insulating, breathable, reusable and, unlike products like horticultural fleece, it’s biodegradable too, which is rather brilliant, especially when we’re all trying to reduce our plastic footprint in all aspects of our lives.
Be er and be er, Chimney Sheep also has a vegan variant, in the form of a course jute fabric and roundels of the same sort of thing, which can either wrap around pots or act as an insulating and weed-suppressant material over or around plants.
So I’ll liberate the pots that I need for spring bulbs, overwintering the tubers frostfree indoors. And the other containers can go into the greenhouse to buy me some thinking time. To protect the dahlias and chocolate cosmos in the soil, I’ll cut the felt into squares, lay it over the top and pin it down with either pebbles or tent pegs. This way at least some of my plants will survive and the summer blooms will rise again!