2025 Seedlings

Bessie · 2025-04-01T16:33:09+00:00

This year, 2025, has been challenging to get healthy Dahlia seedlings! Still trying to figure out the many ways I've gone wrong. I dumped about 30-40 seedlin...

LoveLanguageDahlias

Sadness - I lost all of my seedlings on Thursday/Friday night. The weather has been warm and low temps were forecast to be in the 40s. I put my babies out in a low tunnel and put an extra layer of plastic over the remay. The temperature dropped to 27F over night! They didn't stand a chance. I wasn't the only one duped by the forecast, several friends in my area vegetable seedlings.
I'm starting to get over it now. I cut all of them back to just above the first set of leaves and there are a few lateral sprouts that might survive. Maybe a few of the most vigorous will survive. I learned a lot! And I'll be gathering my own seeds this year. (And I know my partner is looking for a thermometer with an alarm 💕).
More room for the cuttings I can't resist taking.

Flowernut

LoveLanguageDahlias I'm sorry about your seedlings. Sometimes Mother Nature is unpredictable. I'll keep my fingers crossed that the hardy ones recover.🤞

blown_dry

LoveLanguageDahlias Ugh I'm sorry.

Bessie

LoveLanguageDahlias I know how sad it is to lose some of your little "babies". Thanks for reminding us how unpredictable our growing environment may be at times. It's nice to have a place to share our "failures" with those that understand.

calico20hill

LoveLanguageDahlias Oh. I am so sorry! This would be devastating! I hope someone has seeds that can share with you for another try, We had an early frost last year so I am using up my old stash for myself or I would send some to you. I sure hope we have a good year for collecting seeds this time around!

KitCMC

Flowernut I’m sorry that happened. I hope you are pleasantly surprised by how many bounce back 🤞

Teddahlia

A side effect of getting old is that you tend to do things later in the year. We are starting our seeds a couple weeks later than we did 20 years ago. Frost killed a couple hundred seedlings 15 years ago and we learned our lesson. We have enough growing season here that all the seedlings bloom well before the Fall frosts and it makes no sense to get them into the ground too early.

Teddahlia

We are potting up the sprouted seeds and will grow a bit fewer than last year but hard to guess as not all are potted up. We always have seeds that do not sprout and some do sprout unexpectedly. Giants and large seeds sprouted better(that is still terrible when comparing to smaller dahlias). We have so many good seedlings from 2023 and 2024(and prior) that 2025 seedlings can be cut back a bit.
2023 seedling still being grown. It made some nice seeds. Too bright for the camera.

DarcyD

I started my second round of seeds a few days ago. Using vermiculite to cover them instead of potting soil. Just an experiment, I guess to see if they sprout any better with a lighter medium.

LoveLanguageDahlias

Thank you, fellow Dahlia Lovers, for your support and understanding. I'm feeling a lot better after the frost loss. I get to reclaim about 100 pots? Haha! Actually, there are a few that are coming back! I definitely started the seedlings too early in the year, and they were so big (and beautiful) that they had to go outside. Ironically, the temp hasn't dropped below 40 since. Ahhh, Nature, keeping it real. My cuttings are gorgeous and my tubers are waking up beautifully! Thank you again!

Anavage

First post to see how the platform works after lurking around forever.

My first batch of seedlings hardened off and about to be planted. I have another batch ready to take their place on the transitional table. My question is what is folks hard deadline plant by date? I just started my third batch of seeds last night which I should get in the ground first week of June. Anyone have much success getting blooms from seedlings planted end of June early July? Space limitations force me to start in batches of 1-1200. I was hoping to get up to 4k+
I’m near Seattle in Z8-9

Bessie

Anavage welcome! What are your breeding goals? I'd say go for the later planting. The plants will likely catch up in growth as the earlier planted seedlings. Vigor and growth habit are very important characteristics that you'll be able to evaluate even if you don't get a flower this season.

blown_dry

Anavage Welcome! I hope you will tell us more about yourself soon! Good luck with your seedlings.

Teddahlia

Anavage We never planted more than 2600 in one year. We currently plant about 1,000- plus or minus a few. Will a seedling flower when planted near the end of June? Yes and no. Most will and you can evaluate them. Many will bloom in Mid October and later but you cannot trust your evaluation because the weather is too cool to have a normal flower. Your evaluation would be just a guess. Over the years, we noticed that the last flowers(around October 1st) we evaluated and kept each year were not good ones and were culled them the second year. Growing so many seedlings makes the evaluation process very hard as there are so many to evaluate. It sounds easy but everyone who I know that grew too many said they would not do it again. The answer is to improve the quality of the seeds and grow only seeds from good prospects. Bob Chibante grew 12,000- seedlings one year and said he could not evaluate most of them and kept way too many over and lost most of them the next year.
Most people keep 10% of their seedlings. 10% of 4,000- is 400- clumps to dig and divide. If you average 4 tubers per clump you will have 1,600 tubers to plant the next year. We just finished planting 250 tubers from our 2024 seedlings. And I have about 100 plants from cuttings of them to plant. That is 350 plants to further evaluate.

SteveM

Anavage Anyone have much success getting blooms from seedlings planted end of June early July?

As mentioned, you will likely see most of them bloom (unless you are evaluating A or AA seedlings) but the evaluation of October seedlings can be as unreliable as June seedlings because of the shortened day lengths and/or cold weather.

The most seedlings I have ever grown was about 1000 and I considered that to be a full-time job. I hadn't grown seedlings for many years until last year when I grew only 60 seedlings. I had forgotten how much work and how time-consuming it was to evaluate seedlings. The record-keeping alone is a big job and it is not my favorite (but necessary) part of evaluation. This year I will grow 300 seedlings and that should be enough to give me an idea of the direction I need to go with future crosses.

Anavage

Bessie Thanks, these are mostly WL seedlings with the goal of starting hybrid lines based off Ruthie G, Carolyn Wagner, Figurine, Sandia bliss. With smaller numbers of many other WL.

I’m primarily interested in WL,FD,BA,MB,POM, NXso have started a couple hundred of those. I’ve made a number of isolation beds to make a bunch of different populations to look through.

Anavage

blown_dry Thanks for having me! About me I’m a life long horticulturalist that has grown dahlias informally for decades and only a few years ago decided to play with them with intent. Most of my career has been in the public garden world where I served as an intern up to Director of Horticulture.

I am a member of the Kitsap county dahlia society where I am fairly active. My child and I play a game we call Unicorn games where we bring cuttings of harder to find or popular cultivars to trade but mostly give them away. My current project is establishing a formal club seedling challenge that we can leverage to do some fun things down the road. I’m not a big show person but participate and have slowly started the judges training.

I’ve spent most of my life obsessed with dozens of different taxa. The current obsession with dahlias was sparked by a conversation with a flower farmer friend that got me thinking about a Dahlia scapigers plant I started from seed twenty years ago and have neglected since but is thriving. This prompted me to ponder why is there no species availability?why are all current cultivars descended from a couple species? How might I overcome incompatibility issues? Can I source more species? Do I need to go collect seed myself? Are there compatible species we just haven’t tried yet? And about a million other questions that sent me down the rabbit hole. So acknowledging my actual goals and motivation are all long range projects I decided to grow and hybridize what’s available.

So that’s a lot of words to basically say I’ve fallen off the deep end

Anavage

Teddahlia the last couple years I’ve started about a thousand and I think long term that feels about the right number to start annually. My current line of thinking and the justification I’ve told myself is. Im new to hybridizing dahlias and so far I’ve only kept around 70-80 from previous years. So I need to establish the hybrid lines I’ll start to work and I should go as big as possible while I’m only evaluating a couple years worth of plants. In five years I’ll be swamped by hundreds of potential cultivars. So I’m in the go big while you can mindset. I’m green enough in the dahlia world to have lots and lots of “hmm what would happen if” moments when contemplating potential matches. So I’ll overwhelm myself then settle into a more manageable model moving forward.

Anavage

SteveM 1000 is a lot. Just getting rid of the rejects takes a bunch of time. I’m not a fan of digging and dividing it is just soooooo much work and I don’t sell tubers.

I’m a big cutting fan and after digging and dividing 400ish cultivars last year, I am going to plant mostly from cuttings each year. Saving a couple pot tubers of each is more appealing to me.

Good to know you all find late flowers unreliable. Last October one of my last seedlings to bloom might have been my favorite of the year. I’ll temper my excitement to see it again this year.

MissyWeitzel

SteveM Did you ever release any of your seedlings back when you were growing that many? Do you have a specific form you're trying for now?

I'm growing around 200 this season and that feels like a lot. I just finished planting my 2nd and 3rd year seedling tubers and it reminded me I'm gonna have to get a whole lot more strict in my evaluating this year, especially if I plan to continue growing my (ever expanding) stock of named varieties!

Teddahlia

In about 1994 I had a conversation with the late Nick Gitt's Sr. who founded Swan Island Dahlias with his wife Marge Gitts( do not leave her out as she was an amazing women). I asked him how many seedlings he was growing. He said 20,000- but he wanted to grow more. He did not tell me that he hired help to evaluate them and one of our club members and a good friend with Marge spent several full days trying to evaluate them. It was a two step evaluation and step one was to mark the good ones. Step two was to dig it up and if it did not have lots of tubers it was left in the field no matter how good it was otherwise. Nick himself was not a show person and never attended dahlia shows. In his later years, he liked breeding novelty open center dahlias, collarettes, orchid and anemones. At that time these types did not sell well and the office wanted him to breed more "normal" flowers.

Anavage

Teddahlia very Luther Burbankian of him 😆

SteveM

Anavage Good to know you all find late flowers unreliable. Last October one of my last seedlings to bloom might have been my favorite of the year. I’ll temper my excitement to see it again this year.

I find the late seedlings unreliable, but in the opposite way I might have implied. At my latitude dahlias begin to go open-centered starting the 3rd week of October because of the shortened day length. This means any seedling evaluation after Oct. 15th isn't reliable for me because I might be tossing a variety that would normally (under Summer day lengths) be a fully double and possibly a "keeper". I don't know if/when dahlias go open-centered in Seattle, but seedling evaluations after that date will be unreliable.

Bessie

Anavage I’m not a fan of digging and dividing it is just soooooo much work and I don’t sell tubers

We have a lot in common! I love the thrill of growing seeds. Rabbit holes and "what if's" are my nemeses.

« Previous Page Next Page »