I am super into this pot roots thread. It's very annoying to search for "pot tubers" in Google bc you will get 8m posts about how to start your dahlias early in the spring in pots rather than the purposeful growing of pot tubers to be saved over winter. So thank you Missy for starting this thread. (I have, in the past, read all the posts I could find on cubits about this, thank you Ted and other growers for imparting all of your hard won wisdom. )
Groundhogs and maybe also chipmunks (??? think they got trained up on eating my tulip bulbs and are now numerous, monstrous eaters) ate ALL of my dahlia plants down to the nubs, repeatedly, mercilessly. Various rodent solutions would work for a bit, but when it rained would be washed away and next morning any growth eaten to nubs. They even dug tubers out of the ground?! It's been a battle. My surviving plants are 20" high max and NO FLOWERS.
It's quite sad, really, to have no dahlias this season.
The silver lining is (I hope!) that I never planted out my $$ mail order cuttings. I was too afraid to lose them to the rodents and left them in 4" pots on a table. I did have a grand plan to do a lot of pot tubers this year, purposefully, but these were inadvertent till in August I realized, "I accidentally have a table of pot tubers." I'd read in cubits that pot tubers thrive on neglect. So, check! It's super interesting to me that some are chock full of baby tubers and some have nothing but roots, even after the whole summer.
Some of are really outgrowing the little 4" pots so I moved into slightly larger pots. But I am wondering if it makes sense to pot up the chonkier plants, or leave them confined especially now as we are getting to shorter days. Is it the confining that does the magic? Do I want the little pots as dense with roots as possible? And will the pot tubers that are just masses of roots make it over the winter?
Finally, does it make sense to keep these guys going as long as possible in a protected environment? (Temp steady basement under lights, for ex.) Reading about insects in overwintered outdoor plants has me a little bit concerned. Do I want to swap out the soil? I often overwinter whole clumps of plants in pots and haven't had problems but thinking about some of these delicate rootballs.
Thanks! Meghan