The Portland Dahlia society held it's annual meeting at Swan island Dahlias yesterday. It was also a celebration of the success of the ADS National show and the volunteers were treated to a barbecue dinner. It started at 3 PM with judging at the trial garden and I ended up on the team with Teresa Bergman of Cowlitz River Dahlias, and Allen Manual who names his introduction Allens this and that. We were quickly surrounded by several judges in training and we discussed every aspect of judging the entry in great detail. Usually when I team up to judge there, there are two of us and that makes it easier measure the entry and agree on the color chips. It can take 10-15 minutes to judge the entry. It took the greater part of an hour to complete the judging because of the extra training going on and the poor flower did not pass. The team went on to judge things I had already judged in my previous visit and then judged one our entries, so I was not able judge any more . Then before you know it, they rang the dinner bell as it was 5PM.
The line to get to the "Texas Barbecue" went on for few miles when I got there and I did the old trick of sneaking up to the dessert section and started my meal with a cookie and some cake and a lemon bar. The line took forever and not wanting to stand in line, I was forced to go back and get some more dessert but found the macaroni salad instead. Then the line was very short and I was the second to the last person with another person straggling behind me. The straggler was the famous club member Larry Smith who goes by the nickname of "The Body Smith". He has been hosting an exercise program on the cable access channel for about 20 years and is now in charge of publicity for the ADS. I have named a flower after him and it is Hollyhill TBS and I showed it at the last show in Eugene and the BB SC Y flower won blue a ribbon. If I show it to another blue ribbon at the show this week end, it will be in the classification book next year.
Our Portland club now is the largest dahlia club in the ADS. We have over 400 members and it is still growing. 30 new members joined at the National show. I am not used to having so many members and in the "old days" , I knew the name of the majority of the members. No hope to do that now.
Nick Gitts of Swan Island gave his annual presentation to the club and had some interesting flowers to show to us. He mostly answers questions: How many people work at Swan Island Dahlias? Answer "About 12 - 15 full time and and 15-20 more during the harvest time. What do use for fertilizer? This is same question every year and and he says he follows the recommendations on the soil tests they have done and a special custom mixture is purchased and applied to the fields just AFTER planting and it worked into the soil. Note the composition of the fertilizer is never revealed each year. He also supplements the fertilizer with some liquid fertilizer applied when they do the spraying of various things. He talked about his electrostatic sprayer that reduces the amount of chemicals required by huge percent.
The flowers he brought were works in progress and all were sports of either Nick Sr, a giant flower or of My Hero, the sport of Nick Sr. They were impressive and of course I sat there like a "bump on the log" and did not take a picture. One was a huge light blend that was probably 13-14 inches in diameter. The others were a white one and there was a white with pink blends on it . All were very large and all are unavailable to buy for year or two.
I lost my dinner seat during one of my raids to the dessert table. I moved over to another table where I know a couple or three of the people there. It turned out that the table had three medical doctors and two retired nurses and then me. They occasionally talked about dahlias but there were lots of stories about all of them working obstetrics(they all had to do time there) and the various places that births happened in the various places they worked. Hallways, stairwells, elevators and one was just achieved as they lifted the person to the birthing table and they caught the poor baby before it hit the floor.
I took some food home for Margaret and it was a nice meeting.
