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...

Teddahlia

Emilyp How long soak in bleach solution?

Teddahlia

Sprouting seeds. Here is HH Cotton Candy as a "baby" way back when. We have not sold it much in recent years but occasionally, we will have extra tubers.

KitCMC

Teddahlia that must have been an exciting trip to the seedling patch!

Justafewdahlias

Do you bottom water your dahlia seedlings? I understand the rationale yet I find myself making a mess whenever I bottom water. I also am a bit impatient waiting for the soil to be just right….or I will get distracted and next thing you know the soil is soaked. If your dahlia seedlings are in 4inch pots to start or potted up into 4 inch pots are you still bottom watering? Or does it stop at the 4 inch pots? Since I haven’t really done bottom watering with many plants I don’t know if this keeps going for the 4 inch pots or if after that generally people stop?

Teddahlia

"...or potted up into 4 inch pots are you still bottom watering?" Bottom watering is not something we do. Plants here are watered with very weak solution of water and greenhouse fertilizer. We shop at a huge plant nursery(10 acres of greenhouses) and they have tables set up for bottom watering. The set up must be at least 20 years old and still working. They pump water loaded with fertilizer and sulfuric acid into a maze of pipes that loads the water onto the hundreds of tables that have special mats on them. They grow some of the best plants in the area.
Sulfuric acid? Yes, the well water is slightly alkaline and they correct the pH by using sulfuric acid pumped out of a 55 gallon drum. I would never even dream of using it.

The water is in pipes and tubes everywhere and each basket gets the special water though a tube. They also use beneficial insects to to control the bad insects. Some of the baskets have the small paper packet that holds them or more probably held them. I used a couple in our greenhouse and have no idea if they worked or not as we do not generally have insects in there anyway.

MissyWeitzel

I was at my local grow shop today. It's geared toward indoor cannabis growers, but have all sorts of things dahlia growers can't find without ordering online.
Anyway, I was talking about beneficial nematodes with the employee and he said a lot of his customers use them for fungus gnats in their indoor grow rooms. There are multiple variations of beneficial nematodes and for fungus gnats it's 'SF'. That sounds like a really great option for dahlia growers with cuttings and seedlings inside or in a greenhouse I haven't heard mentioned before. Has anyone here used them for that indoors?

Krista

MissyWeitzel I have! And they are the only thing I’ve found that eradicates fungus gnats indoors. A couple notes, my garden store only has them available spring - fall. I couldn’t get them (locally) one year when I needed them in the very early spring. You’ll need to use sticky traps too if you’re going to continue to start seedling/cuttings in new soil (source of gnat larvae) because — as far as I understand — nematodes eat the gnat larvae in the soil. Once fungus gnats are airborne, nematodes won’t be able to help.

MissyWeitzel

Krista I really need to start keeping a journal of products I use both indoors and outdoors each season. I haven't used beneficial nematodes outdoors in 4 seasons and last year I had the worst issue with Asiatic garden beetles chomping on my baby seedlings and dahlia shoots. Should I have used beneficial nematodes? Or something else? Lol
Going back to applying them this year! 🤞

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.

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