Blown centers halfway through growing season

dahlia1972 · 2023-08-22T00:09:24+00:00

I'm in RI, and several of my plants are producing smaller blooms with blown centers after 3-4 successful flushes of perfect large blooms. Very disappointed,...

Teddahlia

My experience is that many varieties never blow their centers prematurely. As breeder, that would eliminate that variety from our breeding garden.

SteveM

Dahlia53 . I'll maybe try another year of these varieties before tossing.

If you have the room, that is what I would try.

AKWindWatcher

I ditto what has been said already. Plants under stress will do whatever they can to reproduce and that means making sure the pollen is available as fast as possible. In addition to getting a soil test, I'd suggest maybe trying to grow in a pot with a good neutral soil like ProMix and in as an ideal location as possible. Basically, try and eliminate negative soil & environmental factors as much as possible for your "one more year" experiment. Microclimate conditions can play a big difference in how plants do up here. (I'm in AK.)

blown_dry

Honnat I have read that theory before, but it seems unlikely as species dahlias show their centers immediately at all points of the blooming season. The only purpose of flowering for a plant is because it's time to make seed. Covered pollen centers/missing pollen centers/sterile flowers in dahlias only are perpetuated because of human intervention. I'm guessing that growing conditions later in the season just don't allow the maximum petals the plant is genetically capable of.

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