Mid Season Dahlia Cuts

So this post is probably a bit more for the commercial farmers in the group, but if you enjoy psychology and figuring out why people make decisions and think certain ways you may like it too.

I deleted a dahlia from our wholesale crop line up mid season this year. In early July we dug a whole row of Marionberry Milkshake plants. We then sold them off as tuber clumps b/c this variety makes great tubers and had even within the 3.5 months it had been planted made some nice clumps.

So why did I do it?
1. It was beautiful and in demand as far as color, shape, and size go but it wasn’t producing a decent number of stems for the amount of row space it was occupying.
2. A large percentage of the flowers had petals that were burning and not holding up to early summer heat well. Thus contributing to a high cull rate on a variety that was already being stingy with the blooms.
3. Organza bags seemed to make the above problem worse. 99% of the dahlias I’ve ever grown are just fine in bags but every now and then I find one like this that just doesn’t seem to like it. Organza bags are a must for our early season bug pressure.
4. The flowers were slow to open in the heat which made predicting bloom time hard. This is important when you sell to florists because you need to know how many stems you are going to have for each week.
5. The blooms came a bit later in our Spring dahlia season than I wanted them too. The more I grow Spring dahlias, the more I find that I need early blooming varieties. In order to have time to get at least 5 weeks of blooms before we have to cut back for our Fall flush, the dahlia needs to bloom in the 65-80 day range. If it’s much longer than this, it doesn’t get going until mid- June and my midsummer prune date is early July.

Now, you may be thinking- wouldn’t the cooler fall weather fix some of these problems. Yes, it would fix some but I’m also a farmer and my goal in growing flowers is to make money so I can pay my bills, pay my employees well and run a financially stable farm. With this is mind, I began running some numbers. I tallied up the number of blooms I thought I would get off those dahlias and multiplied it by my per stem price. Then I began running some other scenarios- How much would a row of zinnias or cosmos make me? Or how much would a different dahlia variety gross?

Lastly I calculated the mental factor- how annoyed was I going to be with keeping this variety? And this answer was — A LOT!

So out it came. Now- will I still grow this variety? Yes, I’ll still keep it in my collection. We grow around 35 varieties in high quantity for wholesale floral sales but keep at least 2x that for other reasons— evaluating new wholesale varieties, tuber sales, etc. Marionberry milkshake will hang around for awhile because I think she’s a great backyard garden variety. She has super strong stems and holds herself up with minimal support. Has a nice busy growth habit- perfect for a good garden specimen plant. So I’d highly recommend if you need a nice lavender for your backyard cutting garden but if you are looking for larger scale production, she’s a skip in my book.

Would you yank a dahlia midseason? What do you think- was this crazy or smart?

PS- I chose zinnias to replace with-I haven’t grown them a lot in recent years so I was kinda’ missing them!