Water Water Everywhere!
It’s hurricane season here in the south and most of the coastline is bombarded by rain at the moment. But what does that mean for your garden and your dahlias?
After growing dahlias through almost 10 hurricane seasons, you pick up a thing or two so here’s what I do to prep my fields for nasty weather.
Holly Hill Black Beauty
I live in the Upstate of SC so not quite the crazy of a full blown hurricane up here. But we do get tropical storms occasionally. (I honestly hate those b/c if were are getting a tropical storm I know my coastal friends are getting slammed with a category 3+ Hurricane. There’s not much you can do in that case.) So really this is advice to get through nasty thunderstorms and high wind.
Preparation is key. It starts from the day you plant your dahlias. Good drainage is your best friend in a heavy rainfall and high wind situation. But you have to plan for it from day 1. If you missed the boat on that this year- go make a note to fix it next Spring. You want your drainage at the level where 6-8” of water will drain off within 24 hours. Dahlias can take sitting in water for that long- it’s not great for them but they’ll make it.
Support- You will probably need extra. We use hortnova netting to support our dahlias. These nasty storms are why we use 2 layers on everything but the shortest varieties. We also went around the field with paracord and used this to tie up any dahlias that were growing outside the netting- they like to try to escape. Paracord works better than twine- paracord tightens up when it gets wet so less droopiness.
Remove the Yuck- Removing the lower leaves on your dahlias in hot climates is a common practice to increase airflow but not always possible when you grow 1000’s. But this has been such a rough summer with the extreme heat that we made time for it. Leaving all the old yellowed foliage on during a heavy rain event is going to cause some fungal problems later on down the road. Most years we only do this as needed but occasionally we have to do the whole field.
Remove the blooms. Blooms that are over the main canopy of your plants are top heavy and are going to catch in the wind and cause your whole plant to sway more from side to side- therefore pulling at the roots unnecessarily. So we remove any blooms above the main plant canopy.
These tips will help protect against major losses in my experience. I saw a question on Facebook the other day and it reminded me of a similar incident that happened to me many years ago. The poster was asking: “Should they try to dig their dahlias to save the tubers after all the rain came through?” It appeared they didn’t have a great drainage situation and were worried about rot.
I had a portion of my field (that is now fixed thankfully) that had very poor drainage. It was mid October and we got loads of rain- standing water of several inches in between the rows. I was really worried about my plants rotting. So since it was almost the end of the season, I cut them back and dug them up. I thought I was being very clever and saving my tubers— WRONG! Removing saturated tubers from the ground is not the right thing to do. There really is something to the process of letting tubers “cure” a bit in the ground before digging. This requires drier soil (not bone dry) but soil with an average amount of moisture. Any year where we’ve had a wet period before we begin digging- I noticed we had increased storage issues during the winter. Years where we get just a bit of rainfall- they tubers always store much better. The amount of water a tuber holds going into storage makes a difference. I don’t know of any scientific studies on it or even how to measure it. But the basis of all good science is observation and observing over many years has taught me to pay attention to the moisture levels in my soil during digging season.
Moral of the story here is — Prepare ahead of time because in this time of crazy weather patterns you never know what’s going to come and I’ve never been sorry that I over-prepared!