Dig Divide Repeat

bloomhjelm · 2024-11-02T06:08:18+00:00

I'm trying to tackle digging and dividing in manageable chunks of time. However each chunk can't be longer than a couple hours so I have many more of these c...

Teddahlia

No dahlia digging on Thanksgiving. Black Friday may better be called "Bleak Friday" as at 11:30Am it is 38F and I am going to dig at 1:00Pm and it may be as warm as 40F then. Oh well, it is a "dry cold".

Teddahlia

Three and a half hours digging and only two more 3 hour days days to the finish line. Margaret told me twenty times the clumps are too heavy as she helped to remove excess dirt(heavy wet dirt) and to load them into the crates. She has been a real help in the digging process. When we finish digging, I am the person who washes and divides them. One crate probably weighed 60 pounds or so. I could not resist harvesting a few more seed pods.

Teddahlia

The longest tuber of 2024. Probably some were longer but my shovel inserted into the surrounding soil(mud) cut them off . They are better off being cut before they have broken necks from too much weight. Dick Parshall (Clearview) considers tubers longer than about 4 inches to be too long and cuts them off to be about 4 inches(or less!) as he plants them. Says he does not let them heal and plants immediately. He is very experienced and does other things different too. For example, all tubers are planted vertically not horizontally in the hole. Swan Island plants tubers randomly as the worker tosses the tuber into an opening in the platform on the tractor. The planting furrow is opened at one end of the platform and closed at the other end. The tuber tumbles into the dirt furrow and is covered immediately.

Teddahlia

We worked outside today and the weather was nice and we worked at our normal pace. In order to finish the digging tomorrow we may have to work a bit harder. It is still possible but even if we do not finish, there will be very little to do. One issue is chasing down all our collapsible vegetable crates that were used to make benches for plants in pots. As we mark the clumps I find some I did not know we had. Hapet Electra? No frost here yet. Waiting for frost is a fools game.

Dahlia53

Teddahlia Ted, these are all still blooming? Amazing! Hapet electra is beautiful. So much color still! All I have is mud and soil erosion. This had to be one of the wettest autumns on record.

PS. I missed dahlia talk! I really hate missing. in this case, I simply... forgot. 😯 Was home, too, I found your notes, though... THANKS! Seemed like another great meeting. I blame my forgetfulness on still not being used to the time change. That's my excuse and i'm sticking with it. Now a schedule change to a Monday for Dec. I hope to remember!

Dahlia53

Teddahlia regarding the pile of dahlia stalks, do you pile them where they can naturally decompose? I wonder if pollinator insects would like wintering in there; that's why I asked. If I could effect one thing on the land where I have a garden space, it is to get the owners used to the idea to leave some 'wild' places on the edge of the wetland woods and not weed-eat and mow everything to death and kill all the beneficial insect queens by gathering piles of debris, branxhes, dahlia stalks - and then burning it all. So far, no luck.I believe this might correlate with our lack of pollinators and beneficial insects but maybe this issue is more about disappearing habitat and over development as well.

Teddahlia

"Do you pile them where they can naturally decompose? " Yes and no. The pile is still there from previous years and I just throw stalks until they reach 5 feet and move over a bit and it is about 25 feet wide now. I have no plans for it but predict in 30 years it will be all gone. Remember where I toss them is on the edge area of a forest. The forest is in a green zone(and my portion of the forest is in the same green zone). No one lives in the forest below us. Irrelevant: 30 feet from the pile is a "cliff" and it is actually the gully where an ancient railroad evened out the uphill grade. If you use metal detector you can find railroad spikes and stuff.

Ted, these are all still blooming? Emphatic NO. Even though it did not frost till Dec. 1st, it was cold and wet for about 3 weeks and 99% not blooming. Nice green leaves on them and about 10% of the seed pods had not rotted, I picked my last seed pod yesterday and all plants gone now.
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Krista

I dug the rest of the tubers that were planted in the ground last night. It was pitch black and 35 degrees out when I finished at 5:20 pm PST. I was so late digging this year and felt like I pushed it a bit since nighttime temperatures have been in the 20s since before Thanksgiving. Being from the rainy side of the mountains, I wasn’t sure how cold and for how long it needs to be to freeze tubers underground?

I’m really looking forward to my first soil tests around the new parcel. This bed was planted on 6/10/24 (spent almost 6 months in the ground) and all clumps were very small, some just mothers + a couple of spindly tubers. At planting time I have them a handful of alfalfa pellets and some chicken feather meal - but nothing else since I couldn’t get a test completed before planting. Seems they’ll definitely need some amending of some sort to get better sized clumps next season. 😅

Also, I planted garlic in that bed right after pulling the dahlias. Way late for planting garlic here in 6B but what else was I going to do with all that seed garlic? We’ll see what happens.

calico20hill

Krista I wonder if the Tall Grass Farms could give you any good advice about growing "East of the Mountains" as we say in Washington/Oregon....And could you send in that soil test now before every other farm does? It seems like you need these clues in order to get bigger tubers for storing.

Krista

calico20hill I wonder if the Tall Grass Farms could give you any good advice about growing "East of the Mountains" as

That’s a great call, Noni! There are a number of folks growing this side of the mountain and most whom I’m connected with finished digging/dividing weeks ago. I’ll have to ask a round some more and do more experimenting too!

Teddahlia

"Seems they’ll definitely need some amending of some sort to get better sized clumps next season. 😅"
On Dahlia Talk it was agreed that this was the best season for tuber production since "Hector was a pup." (a really old phrase meaning in a long time).

Fertilizer applied in small amounts until September is what we do. Potato farmers know that in order to get large potato yields it takes lots of fertilizer and believe it or not they mean nitrogen. All three of the majors (NPK) need to be available(not necessarily all added as some phosphorus is in the soil here) along with water and sunlight. People underestimate the role of nitrogen in making plants have enough leaves to flower and produce tubers.

Krista

Teddahlia Fertilizer applied in small amounts until September is what we do. Potato farmers know that in order to get large potato yields it takes lots of fertilizer and believe it or not they mean nitrogen.

I’ve often wanted to continue with nitrogen past the Aug 1 cut-off the seems to consistently be recommended. Finding out you continue in small amounts is cool to hear. I guess it all depends on how much is retained where we’re located — annual rainfall here is about 8” which is a far cry from the 40” we expect in Seattle.

I’ve always assumed it’s practically impossible to ever have any or enough nitrogen to not need to amend at planting time, but perhaps here it could happen?

SteveM I’m hoping to get a soil test this fall to find out some soil basics and begin a plan for amendments. I will also plan for a spring test once our irrigation has been turned on again. I’d like to see the results of saturated paste tests to get an idea of what’s water soluble, and a general idea of what might be coming in with the irrigation water. Thanks very much for noting nitrogen at planting time - we can test for nitrogen again then too!

SteveM

The importance of nitrogen for best dahlia growth/tuber production is the main reason to do soil tests shortly before planting and not in the Fall. Winter rains leach out nitrogen so a soil test in the Fall will not be an accurate indicator of the actual amount needed in the Spring.

Teddahlia

My assumption is that nitrogen leftover to the next year is negligible and that it is in effect none. It is both water soluble and evaporates into the air(air is mostly nitrogen.) A cover crop can "sequester" some nitrogen that can supplement what you need to add. I use time release nitrogen and it is urea based, meaning that it is not available to plants until bacteria convert it to nitrates and they say that takes almost two weeks. If you want an immediate nitrogen kick start, calcium nitrate turns leaves dark green in a couple of days. I do not use it as it is expensive and does not store well(it solidifies) . In the old days when they said "nitrogen burns plants" they were referring to nitrate fertilizers that do burn plants. Urea does not generally burn unless you go crazy with the amount. Organic growers are using chicken feather meal for nitrogen and it is time release. Alfalfa pellets have some too but nothing like the chicken feathers. All the old fashioned fish fertilizers had nitrogen in them. Fish pellets are great except all the dogs and other carnivores in your neighborhood will dig them up along with your dahlias.

Teddahlia

Bat guano; There was report that some people caught a serious fungal infection from bat guano they collected from a local bat habitat. I have not used it in many years and I believe the commercial versions are safe. My issue with it is that it has too much phosphorus, not that is not a good fertilizer.

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