Fall brings so many wonderful feelings of harvest. When the blueberry bushes start turning vivid red and the storms start raging through, it signals the end of dahlia season on the north coast of Oregon. That means time for the Great Dig and Divide. Some years we have a delayed frost. In 2021, we dug tubers in December and still had not had a frost. This year, November 9th the world got cold. Surprisingly the Cafe Au Laits made the first frost, but a week of freezing temperatures laid the dahlia patch to rest.
For us, digging in the fall is a bit like Christmas. You just don’t know what you will pull out of the ground. We planted our largest patch yet with 85 plants. To be honest, from the moment we put them in the ground, we felt daunted about pulling that many tubers (and some of you out there had hundreds of plants- WOW!)
Over the past two weeks, we have been working to pull the plants and have about 15 to go. Like many in the Pacific Northwest, we got a late plant and now a somewhat early frost. We were expecting the crazy number of tubers we got in 2021, some plants yielding 15-30 tubers each. To our surprise, every clump has been small and manageable. We are averaging 6-10 tubers per plant.
To our immense happiness, we have no signs of gall or viral infection in the plants. Most of our plants we have grown on sight for over three years. We added a few newbies and they were isolated. They too came out looking good, but we will watch them for another year or two before calling them clean stock.
The smaller clumps does have us wondering about the dahlia games of 2023 and if tubers may be a little harder to acquire or if prices will be higher because there is more demand than product. It’ll be interesting to see if other gardens were impacted like ours.
Less time digging and dividing meant more time for photographing and creating help pages. We hopefully have two simple to follow and well illustrated pages to help you in your Great Dig and Divide. Please check them out via the links below and leave feedback.
Cheers and Happy Gardening.
