Time to Fix It!

Unfortunately a few rows of our dahlias haven’t rebounded from the 10+ days of rain we had recently. So it’s fix it time!! I don’t enjoy doing things like this mid season but since it’s early enough in the season, we can fix it and still get a crop for this fall.

Here’s my plan:

The situation is this: I’ve got a row of Ryecroft Jan dahlias (beautiful white ball) that are drooping and giving signs that the tubers are rotting.

We are going to cut back the plants, dig them up. We’ll go through the clumps to see if anything is salvageable. If so, we’ll replant those tubers but most likely I think we are going to have to replace. I’ve got some left over Blizzards so I’ll swap those in.

Before replanting, we will dig out the pathways on either side which will raise the bed up some and then also we will add a few inches of compost on top to raise the level of the bed.

Ideal situation in this scenario would be if I had rooted cuttings available to replant with those. The row has some rooted cuttings we planted this Spring and those plants are faring great! They have more roots available to handle the water and haven’t developed big tuber bases yet.

This pic above was taken in the middle of all the rain and shows the row at it’s worst. The dahlias in the foreground have rebounded but over half the row towards the back is still struggling. We might keep part of the row, I’ll see how things look as we dig. Wish us luck! We’ll definitely be doing some major work in here this winter but need to get a “band-aid” on it for now!