Well it’s definitely that time of year- If you are digging your dahlias, it’s time to get them into storage. I realized I’ve never really written a lot about this subject so I thought I’d take the chance to tell you about our storage process.

Each year in November, we spend most of the month digging dahlia clumps out of our field. Everything is hand dug, our field is not set up for mechanized digging. So it’s all shovels over here! This year I have an amazing crew and it’s going much faster than normal. Once the tubers come out of the ground they go into labeled bulb crates. Each crate get three labels— one on each handle and one inside the crate. No mixing up crates on this farm! It happened once many years ago and I vowed never again!

Then the tubers are allowed to dry for several hours. We grow in heavy clay soil and sometimes the soil is damp while digging. I love when we have dry weather during digging but that’s never a guarantee. Once the dirt had dried some, the clumps either go straight to the flower cooler. Sometimes we will wash immediately and then allow the clumps to dry. The flower cooler keeps them at the right temperature and humidity until we can get to dividing.

Few washing tips:
1. Use a nozzle with a variable flow. This is important because sometimes you need a little more water pressure to bust the clay out of the center of the clump.
2. Wear water proof gear. This year I bought a vinyl butchers apron. It has been a great addition to our set up- anybody can wear it b/c it’s one size fits all and it’s long enough to cover the majority of your body and thick enough the water doesn’t come through.
3. Angle your table forward. I lift the back legs of my table up by about an inch or two so that the water rolls forward away from me.

After drying and a few days of cooler storage, we divide the clumps. We do all our division in the fall because we don’t have time in Spring and we also need to know final tuber counts for our sales. After division the tubers go back into the cooler or if we are really on top of it, they get stored right away. Each tuber is stamped with a 4 letter abbreviation of their name. I keep an excel spreadsheet with the key to these names. This also helps with ensuring varieties don’t get mixed up in storage.

We are switching to vermiculite this year as our storage medium. We’ve been using peat moss for 10+ years but I finally got tired of all the mess and dust. I already like it better and we’ve only stored about a 1/4 of our tubers so far. No huge clouds of brown dust erupting every time we store a crate of tubers. We store in clear plastic bins- I prefer a shallow bin- one that’s about 10-12” tall. Deep bins are hard to check your tubers and it’s too easy for tubers to get moldy and then you don’t notice until spring. Your storage environment should be between 40-50 degrees and 85-90% humidity. I use a Govee device to monitor my storage conditions as it connects to my phone.

Once the tubers are in storage, then the checking process begins. I set a reminder on my phone to check every 2 weeks. I just go into the flower cooler and rummage around each bin a little bit. I’m checking to make sure they aren’t drying out or getting moldy. This process can save your tubers if you have a problem. If you store and forget about them until Spring, you’ll be one of the people emailing me with tails of woe- how all their tubers got moldy or shriveled! It only takes 5 minutes- so go set that reminder now!!