"Will you make cuttings of these varieties or will you just enjoy this basket as is?" For many years , we took cuttings from the plants in the baskets. We are older now and the number of hours per day doing gardening tasks has declined and we focus more on "things dahlia" . Yes, Margaret takes plant cuttings but mostly of the filler plants that root easily without having to be under lights. She used to have several hundred petunia and calibrachoa, verbena ,and other plants in flats under the lights stealing my dahlia cutting space. She has discovered like most people that you can buy small plants at the nursery and grow them bigger.
Hint: we buy small plants at the retail portion of large production nurseries. They put together many thousands of hanging baskets. They order the plants for the baskets from the international mega nurseries as "plug flats" and put the baskets together from those plugs. They always order too many of this or that and sell the extras in their retail area(one has 10 acres of greenhouses and only one acre is the retail nursery) and Margaret has a good eye for her favorite varieties or new ones. She has done as many as 250 hanging baskets and other similar containers but she is cutting back to ??? number. We are going to her sister's house today to put together the 20-30 containers for her.
