This year around I figured I shouldn’t wait until the end of the season to start posting about our dahlias. They are lovely and extraordinary botanical specimens that should be enjoyed at the height of the harvest, albeit virtually. In truth, I’m trying to be more diligent about communicating our projects to a wider audience. Over the past year and a half, I’ve been on the sidelines for lots of different reasons and consuming everyone’s else knowledge and creativity. Now I feel like it’s high time for me to start contributing to the community.
As a start, you’ll see that I’ve posted pictures of some of the varieties we grow together with their names! Honestly, you should really see the backlog of dahlia photos that I have on our hard drives since our early days of growing. I’ve kept meticulous photo records, although none are labelled and I’ve sort of lost track of the names — oh well.
A few growing notes this year. The weather has undoubtedly been atypical with a wettish June, dry July, super-wet and HOT August and a hot September thus far (except for today and this past weekend). The dahlias struggled and have stayed pretty short compared to a few years ago when the plants towered by multiple feet above me. I’m not sure why. It could be because we’ve cut down some very large pine trees that were blocking the morning light and hence the dahlias no longer needed to stretch for the light. Or perhaps the underground stream that ran underneath the beds have since dried up. Another possible culprit is planting in the same beds every year. However, we do amend the beds with fresh compost at the beginning of each season.
At any rate, I’m starting to grow other flowers in addition to the dahlias. This year, I grew scoop scabiosas which were expensive to procure (and the grower messed up order and I ended up with more scabiosas than I wanted). Next week, I’m getting three trays of cold hardy annuals — delphinium, snapdragons and nigella — that I’ll put into our raised beds. And later this fall, we should be getting a whole bunch of tulips. We planted 500 last year but only 30 or so actually made it through. The beds got too wet and the bulbs rotted out. I’m trying my luck again with the tulips but will plant them on higher ground.
This is the update so far and, now, onto the pictures!
