Dahlia Talk Zoom meeting Tuesday night. My article les the spreadsheet on flowers.
Dahlia Talk
09-24-24
by Ted J. Kennedy
This Zoom meeting was entitled “ Show and Tell” and not after one of my favorite dahlias but because participants were allowed to show us three blooms from their gardens. There were 27 participants and not all of them displayed their flowers. The moderator limited the number of flowers to three, however a few overly zealous people had the audacity to show us four blooms. If I were a judge I would have disqualified them for “ostentatious exhibitionism” or some such thing but actually we all enjoyed seeing an extra flower. I am going to list the name of the grower and their flowers in an embedded spreadsheet and our master bulletin writer Greg Lum will incorporate it into this article.
Good discussion on new sprayers. Dan Baulig and Mark Oldenkamp each bought a battery operated sprayer that holds 15 gallons and has a 125 foot long hose and is on a cart with pneumatic tires. All for about $279-. It sounded too good to be true. One of them bought it on E-Bay. Allen has a battery operated back pack sprayer that shoots it's spray 25 feet or more and saves lots of time as he can spray several rows at the same time. Ted has a $12.99 sprayer bought from Bi-Mart and the only really good thing is the price. There is being sold a device to add to your old sprayer to make it into a battery sprayer. It attaches to the spray hose of a $12.99 sprayer(or any one) and saves your arm from pumping all the time. I did not get the price.
Cucumber beetles were the star of the session with many hundreds of thousands visiting several grower's gardens. No good control method but someone mentioned using a vacuum cleaner(battery operated) to vacuum them up.
More powdery mildew discussion and no definitive cure.
One or two people who did not have actual flowers showed some pictures of flowers. I did not take notes.
There was some discussion on Kidd's Climax being a wonderful flower despite being about 85 years old. Lots of winning in shows. Phil Mingus used it for breeding for many years with excellent results. It may be sold with a different name and over the years there were some sports of it.
This session was very interesting and there was lots more discussion concerning dahlia breeding and Dick Parshall and myself forgot we were on Zoom and carried on a 10 minute conversation on dahlia breeding like we were talking on the telephone. Then someone had the audacity to interrupt us and ask a question.
As I always say, I left out most of the content of the meeting in writing this article and you should participate at our next session on October 22nd at 7PM. We may be doing pictures of our favorite dahlias if we can work out the technology details of sharing a bunch of pictures with out glitches. We may ask for pictures in advance, more details to follow.
