Dahlias and Hurricanes
Well there’s a title I never thought I would write. This is one of those blogs that may have more answers than questions right now. But one of the many reasons I blog is to have a record of what happens while growing dahlias in climates they hate. And now we have another reason they hate this climate.
But yet, we persevere!
So - the facts: From Sept 26-27, the Upstate portion of South Carolina (along with western North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, northern Florida, and a swath of Georgia from the coast to the Carolina border was hit by Hurricane Helene that made landfall as a category 4. I know we received over 11” of rain at our farm. This was also after a severe thunderstorm had already come through our area 2 days before causing some damage and soaking our soil to the saturation point.
First off: How do you prepare?
1. Harvest everything you can from your fields. Don’t leave partially open flowers to wave around in the wind and rock your plants- this disturbs the roots.
2. Support everything! Make sure all your netting is in place and secured, add extra corralling.
3. Prune plants if needed. If this storm had come through in August, I would have pruned any really tall plants back knowing I had enough time for them to regrow/bloom. Since this was the end of September, we didn’t do that this time.
4. Increase your drainage. If you know you have areas of poor drainage, pre-dig some routes for water to escape.
Then you go hunker down and stay safe during the storm.
Afterwards:
So one thing I’ve learned is to give things a little time. They always seem worst right after the storm. So the only thing I did the first day was observe. I recorded how bad the damage was and where. I learned one area of my farm is a wind tunnel. The dahlias there were not just blown over- it looked like something had whipped them around and caused a massive tangle of plants. We had to cut that row back by half. It won’t bloom again this year but there was no salvaging it, best we can hope for now is tuber growth. Fortunately the weather is being kind now and we are staying dry.
Our home farm sits on a hill and never have I been more thankful for it. Majority of the standing water drained off within 24 hours. It did leave some silt in areas that still needs to be removed but mostly we had to cut out a lot of broken and damaged stems. Most of the blooms were windblown and waterlogged. All in all I would say we lost about 75% of our saleable blooms for the week in this field.
Our offsite location was not as fortunate. We had 4 rows of white dahlias. We sell a lot of white dahlias because a large majority of our customers are wedding florists. Two of the four rows had just started blooming about week and a half before and the other two rows were budding up. On Saturday when I took the first look, here’s what I saw:
Wilted, stressed out plants. Those plants are basically drowning because so much water had come down and this field is flat. The blooming rows looked like this:
The left picture is a week before the storm, the right is a day after the storm. I’ll admit I was very discouraged when I saw this. This field represents a significant portion of our income for October. White dahlias are the one color I can always sell. And now we’ve lost 90% of what was in bloom.
The above picture is from Tuesday morning. You can see where the plants on the left side are rebounding but the right side is still wilty. The two non-blooming rows look like this all the way down. One plant is fine, the next one is drowning. Right now, about 40% of the plants look okay. However, I dug around in the soil and could feel mushy tubers. This is not a good sign. My hope is that they have a big enough tuber base that they won’t rot completely. These are second year plants and they are Blizzards (which are amazing tuber makers). A late frost and a dry October would be a huge blessing right now. Might be enough time to get some blooms and new tuber growth out of these plants. The only thing we have done to these is to pull back the mulch so the soil will dry out faster.
We just raked it into the pathway. Should help a little, I hope!
I was able to cut the damage out of about 20’ of one row. So we’ll get a few more blooms but the rest of the rows looks like this:
I honestly don’t know if cutting back this hard was the right decision. But after 4 days, I was already seeing yellowing foliage and the plants were so stressed. I felt like removing the heavy foliage burden from the plants might give them a chance to regrow. At this point, it’s a waiting game.
The goal changed after this storm came through- at this point, it’s all about saving the tubers! Losing the blooms is a substantial loss but loosing the tubers would be 4x the loss. One thing I do know from previous tropical storms: you don’t dig your tubers when they are saturated. I thought this would be a good idea a few years ago after I saw plants sitting in water after a tropical storm. Those tuber clumps mostly rotted in storage. Tubers that have an excessively high water content don’t store well! So here’s hoping for a beautifully dry October and really late frost. We need time for plants to regrow!