DAHLIA TOUR | You won't believe the size!

hi everyone so i'm back i took a little bit of a break there not intended but it's been a couple of weeks since i put up a video so thanks for waiting uh i thought we should talk about dahlias so let's start before i'm going to give you just the whole tour of all the dahlias growing i have been waiting to do this tour because i kept thinking they were going to get better and they were going to get better and i'm not sure they're going to get any better it has been a weird dahlia year and i know so many of you are experiencing that too i can't tell you how many messages i've had from people saying my dahlias just are not blooming or they're not really doing anything what is going on so i think there's two things going on much of the country has been dealing with some major drought dahlias don't love drought they like regular water so the dahlias along the house here are on drips so they get water every single day dahlias in other parts of my garden that basically never get water have buds but they're not blooming yet and so to me that's definitely the difference there the other thing is that's been very hot in some places and dahlias also don't like a lot of heat they're not really happy with those like 90 and up temperatures at all so i think that's been holding things back in a lot of places as well i don't think here we deal with that problem quite as much it just doesn't get super super hot here the other thing that's going on is that we just get most of august we had no rain so maybe last week we got a good dumping of rain which was really nice everything needed it unfortunately everything flops so i spent most of last week standing things back up again now i've got these dahlias staked pretty well along here i use that florida weave method and i'll link to a video where i talk about how i do that so they're working pretty good here but in other places in the garden and all the sort of annuals that grow below this all sort of flopped over and i'll tell you everything in the garden is just looking tired right now i think though that long stretch of dry just didn't do the garden any favors but we have some dahlias blooming and i thought i'd walk you through them so you can see what's going on but we're going to start i think we're just going to work our way down this row and then we'll go around the rest of the garden so the way i arranged the dahlias along this wall this year was i was trying to do a sort of graduated color effects so i started with sort of um bright pinks and oranges and apricots here and then i moved down to sort of paler colors and then i picked up the pink again and we got darker as we went that way that is how i planned it that is not how it worked but we are starting right here at labyrinth now labyrinth has been doing amazing a couple weeks ago i showed a picture there's three labyrinths right here and i think in one day i had 25 blooms on them it has been outstanding unfortunately you might be able to tell that things don't look quite right here and i'll tell you what happened these first two plants have spider mites mites tend to happen especially with dahlias when it's been a very dry period i suspect on the end down here they don't get as much water in the drip system and i think that's what's going on here so what am i going to do about it i don't know i spent a lot of time checking out the daily society of america's website to deal with this spider mites are very difficult to deal with and really their recommendation is pull them out before they infect everything i don't know if my heart can allow me to do that so i don't know what i'm going to do about it yet but you can see that it's been having a problem so you can see that the foliage is sort of mottled there are these brown spots on them you come up here i don't know if you can see this probably can't there are very fine little spider webs the flowers don't look quite right everything here again is just the leaves this is not what what good dahlia foliage should look like there are you know this is all this is all bad so it's mostly just on these first two plants so we i could deal with it that way it leaves a pretty big hole in the garden and also look at their their bare legs down there because i had to prop up so many things on the bottom anyway um listen it's not labyrinth's fault that it got spider mites labyrinth is a lovely dahlia that has nothing to do with the type it's just bad luck and it's still beautiful no matter what so next i want to show you one that's new to me this year this is penn hill watermelon um it's so good it's a really really good one you guys it gets i love these sort of twisted petals on it i think that's really pretty you can see that there's some difference in the colors on it now this one can get um quite big the first bloom that i that i cut from this and often the biggest blooms you get are the first ones and then they get smaller from there was 10 inches across but there is one i want to try to show you and i have to get a ladder to show it okay so i'm up on a step ladder this this plant is easily seven feet tall why this one got so big i'm not sure maybe because they're kind of crammed in here and it was looking for some light okay so this is also penn hill um watermelon and look at how much darker pink this is this is actually the color that i more expected out of this flower but this one and this is the first bloom on this specific plant which is probably why it's so big okay i think the only way to properly show this to you was to just cut it and actually you can see that it's starting to be done anyways the petals are starting to look a little bad on the backside there but i mean check that out so this is size and i did bring out a tape measure so let's let's see if you were going from petal to petal i mean that's an easy 10 inches and maybe 11. so anyway you know it's big it's a bouquet all in itself but isn't that stunning and the the twisty petals and each petal is each petal has like a little bit of striation in it so it's just a gorgeous dahlia all right let's keep going okay moving on down the road here we may move to breakout now breakout's been interesting for me this year last year it was quite a lot more yellow this year so far it's been quite pale creamy pink almost like a ballet pink with a light yellow center which is a color that i quite like on it the thing about this dahlia is the petals are quite a bit wider the individual petals and the whole flower is flatter some of these dahlias kind of have a dome on it this one is quite a bit flatter which is just a different look i like the wider petals on it i think it's a good texture balance but again this one is six feet tall so you're getting into a tall dahlia with breakout okay so next up in our line here is cafe au lait wait that's not cafe olay and that's what i want to talk about you guys this is how all my cafe olays look this year i had to buy all if you remember i had to buy get all new cafe aulais this year because last year i lost them and by lost them i mean i don't mean they died i meant i literally misplaced them and i never did end up finding them it must have been a mislabeling thing and i think maybe i threw them out as something else that i didn't want to keep so i ordered new cafe olays and this is cafe lay this year and this happens with dahlias if you have ever stored dahlias you know that these tubers one tuber looks exactly like another there is no way to tell what variety a tuber is to my knowledge so if you label them wrong or you have a labeling issue you end up with getting the wrong dahlia now this could be a labeling issue in the growing fields this could be a labeling issue anywhere along the line it's not my labeling issue this time a lot of times it is but not this time so um you so it's a disappointment when that happens i'm not going to lie i obviously did not plan for a really corally red to be right underneath this window box i planned for those pretty colors of cafe lay here but it's not the end of the world it's actually really a nice form on adelia these are quite a bit smaller than what i've been seeing and if you're looking for i mean it's kind of a scarlet red it's not a color i ever would bought i still have no idea what dahlia this actually is but you know so this happens and i just want to share that with you because i bet you a lot of you have had this happen too and i know it's frustrating by the same token i would say it's extremely easy to see how something like that can happen okay next up uh here is that you guys can tell i think that i have a color theme that i like with dahlias i really seem to and i think i might have overdone it this year i really lean heavily towards the apricots and the peaches and the pinks so this one i think pretty sure this is belle of barmera again um a lot of different colors that we're seeing here this one back here which is sort of spent has a much darker pink okay so same flower look at the different colors so colors can change with jelly is a lot of times it's a light thing a lot of times it's day length sometimes if they're hidden behind or facing the other way they're a different color so um this is what i typically think of of the bellas of the as the belle of barmera color both pretty though so the next flower in the uh penn hill family and i'm gonna just run up here and cut this so that you can actually see it better because unfortunately they're way over here okay so this is the next uh part of the pen hill family this is penn hill dark monarch this was maybe my favorite dahlia last year this is quite a small flower for it usually they're quite a bit bigger and i have a few more of them growing where i've been getting much bigger flowers but it's it's this is a much richer i don't know what color you call it but a deeper pink again you see those again you see those striations uh in the petals and that's i think sort of the hallmark of these penhold ones so i don't know if there are any more in this pen hill series but between penn hill watermelon and penn hill dark monarch these are two of my favorite dahlias and so i would love to try any of the other ones if there are more but really pretty and i like the form on this one too so i do have dahlias that grow behind what are really disreputable looking cherry tomatoes right now but i just noticed that i ended up having a breakout in there which was again not supposed to be there but i want to show you this one because this is a much more tip what i think think is a more typical breakout color also a nice big size on this and look at the width of those petals so i just want to quickly go back to breakout and show you that one okay so that's all the tall ones i generally plant the dinner plates to get there against the house and i try to keep shorter ones over here now we are just on the other side of the patio and i don't change this area up very often because i really like sort of where the placement's been the past couple of years and the first one i want to show you is creighton honey so if i have to make a list of my top five dalys and someday i think i'll try to write a post on that for the blog crichton honey is going to be on that list i saved it's a very hard tuber to find if you find it i would buy it i don't see it around very often i can't tell you why these are all these are all creighton honey now this this one is a little spent but so you can see the variation in color it's generally a salmon color to a yellow color sometimes they go more yellow sometimes they go more salmon this is sort of what i think is the most typical color of a creighton honey but it's a really nice ball probably grows about i mean i would say 30 inches maybe so i sometimes stake them and i sometimes don't i think it's probably better to stick a short steak within and try to keep them in because they did get a little floppy on me uh when we had all that rain but they're they don't need a great deal of support just a little bit but i mean how can you not love creighton honey so you might have noticed i i seem to have quite an affinity for a ball dahlias and i i i don't know what i'll never get over it this is a new one for me this year this is linda's baby in fact all three of these are linda's baby and i cut three of them to just sort of show you that there's not a ton of color difference on them sometimes they get a little paler um they're a touch smaller than creighton honey so these two let me just grab the creighton honeys for you these two are the creighton honeys you can tell they're really similar they're very similar you know in color tone and form i think if you were just starting to buy dahlias you probably are better off just picking between linda's baby or creighton honey because they're similar enough that you can get into that later but again a really nice in fact this flower in particular is quite nice because you can see how they sort of wrap around the back but the center is still closed same basically the same height as creighton honey same form very similar in a lot of ways i wouldn't be surprised if there's similar parentage behind these two so this tall red one behind me reddish pink is new for me this year this is ka's rosie joe here's what it looks like it's again another ball i had to look far and wide and i'm pretty sure i paid a lot for that tell you i had no idea it was going to get that tall so that was a little surprise i probably wouldn't have put it right there and not that i mind it because it's beautiful but i think it's well named it's very rosy color and beyond that just behind it is marn which is a really really nice terracotta color it's not a bright orange it's a yet definitely a goldie or orange ball that has again really nice form and really really tight petals if you look at the difference between the petals on this this one has very tight petals and these are like slightly have more of a tip to them it's just kind of i don't know i get so into the ball dahlias that i guess i'm looking for differences in them now but anyways both of them are new for me this year i like them both i guess the answer is i would grow both again but then it's hard to find a dahlia i wouldn't grow again okay so at the bottom of your frame here you can see uh hs date so i think you guys probably know if you've been watching me for any amount of time that i'm a big fan of the hs series of dahlias hs stands for happy single now happy single dahlias have dark almost well i would say it's very dark olive green foliage and they just produce flowers massively as long as you keep deadheading them they will just keep producing flowers and the bees and the butterflies absolutely adore them so this is two of them that i'm growing now this one is hs date much orange much more orange and this one is hs kiss hs kiss is new for me this year it's more of an apricot i actually think between the two of them that i prefer the hs date it's a little bit more impactful in the garden although they're both again very similar i don't know that you would need to have both of them i think you'd probably be good by just picking your favorite of the two i think the flowers on hs date are slightly larger than the flowers on hs kiss now whether that's just where they're growing or whether that's common for the plants i'm not sure but those are two i have another hs flame that we'll look at in a bit before we move around we've got a lot more dahlias to look at if you can believe that this is a gallery art nouveau the gallery series of dahlias are really nice because they're super short they never need staking and they all have kind of slightly different blooms this one is a little bit more orange with sort of a fuchsia underside on them and that flower might look good but i want to show you zoom out here a little and show you these plants so these plants look terrible this one in particular has looked terrible for a long time and i believe this is thrips thrifts is another problem with dahlias i have never had that problem before to be honest and it's been going on all summer they still keep blooming so i haven't done anything about even though the foliage doesn't look great i have just let them do their thing and they're still blooming away the flowers don't last for a long time and they're not big but they're a lot of nice look for not a lot of work because you don't have to stake them or anything i've been leaving this dahlia which is basically done and about to die i mean the flower for a long time because i wanted you to see this one on the stem can you even believe this new one for me this year peachy salmon dinner plate i'm going to have to look through my orders and figure out where i ordered from because it's one of the ones i added on for a shipping deal and i am going to cut it right now for you guys okay can you even this is another enormous one look at this thing i i had noah when i bought this i certainly had no idea now again all this petals this is a spent flower this actually now that i look at this it almost looks to me like this flower has two centers but it doesn't look like that from the bottom nice super wide petals bent back i would describe this color as sort of i'm hoping let me turn the camera because i hope you can get a better an accurate depiction of the color on this i think you can see the color a little better here so i would say this color is salmony pink and the center is a very gold very orangey gold color so there's so the other thing about this plant is that it's only about four feet tall maybe even no it's about four feet i would say this flower was growing at four feet maybe slightly less so i don't know if that's supposed to be like that because i barely remember ordering this plant but it's a really nice height because i have it staked low it's got super strong stems and it couldn't really be in a better spot where than where it is right now you don't need to go to extraordinary measures to stake this one a nice low stake would work and then you get a flower like that okay so there's a couple more that grow in this part of the garden both of them are about you know maybe three and a half feet tall they both could use a little staking really lovely ones that probably should have been in a better spot first one is bacardi and this beauty i don't know the name of but i will by the time i put some names up on the screen so whatever it says on the screen is what this is but it's awfully pretty kind of almost little lavender center on that kind of a nice change for my oranges that i have everywhere so speaking of oranges everywhere here's another one but this is a lovely one this is maya um and this is i believe what they call a water lily form flower and this is really let me get you closer here it's a nice change really pretty flower form on that and again um kind of a goldy peach-ish orange should have been in a better spot too but when you grow all these dahlias what's a better spot they're all fighting for it okay we gotta keep moving i am bird in daylight because i can't stop talking about dahlias so this year i did plant some dahlias along on this area which i haven't done before but i like it a lot and i think it's interesting because i have a lot of the same dahlias that i have up there so first of all i've got some labyrinths down here now you can see these labyrinths which are not staked by the way are three and a half feet tall so i think one of the things that i've learned here is that now these did get in a lot later than the ones over there so they just could be slow because of that but also i really have them crammed in there against the house so i think some of those are growing a little taller than they might not grow if they were just a loose and these are really pretty flowers and these don't have spider mites so that's nice too and then as we come down here we've got some more cafe olays which would have been very pretty with the flamingo celosia there had they been cafe olays but they're not so we get these are better examples of this flower this cafe olay imposter as well it's it's not an ugly flower by any stretch the imagination and then just to show you down here i've got several planted down here and they've all got buds but i wanted to show you that i have a lot of dahlias that are not blooming yet either i think this is thomas edison and um avion something else blooming down here again not staked should be staked not staked but they're holding up okay somewhere along the line i ended up with tons of nui data dahlia tubers so i have them scattered throughout the garden and here's one of them sort of a cactus type dahlia it actually looks like something's been nibbling on that that looks like earwig damage to me but just an all-around good performer nice dark dahlia so i think i've showed you these dahlias in a previous video um new for me this year joey morella okay it's another ball dahlia i get it you guys i have a problem nice dark one even fades out when they're pretty but i mean sorry when they get old they even are pretty i was hoping this one wouldn't need staking but it does it definitely needs staking it gets i mean this one right here is all of four feet tall the rest are three and a half so do plan on staking this one but you can do a low stake on it you don't need like a seven foot stake on this one extremely floriferous and this is not ones these don't get regular watering over here these are pretty much planted and go i do water them for a little bit after right after i plant them but these don't get a lot of extra attention so this has been a fabulous a fabulous performer the last of the hs dahlias that i have in the garden here is this one this is hs flame i've grown this one in this spot for several years it has not performed nearly as well as it has in past years but this is the flower bright cherry red flower on the darkest foliage of all of them that grow here although this one gets less sun than the other ones so maybe the foliage is darker because it gets less sun and maybe that's why it's not performing as well also i've had these tubers for many years and i didn't divide them that much i left them in fairly big clumps and i suspect that might be hindering their blooming this year too so i think that covers all the dahlias in my yard i skipped over a couple because at some point i don't know that you guys can look at any more ball dahlias i'm going to try not to buy any more next year i don't know if i'll be successful but the best part of a dahlia tour is this so this is that uh peachy salmon dinner plate this is the penn hill watermelon and this is that breakout that i just grabbed which is no slouch either plus all those other ones so i have a beautiful bouquet to enjoy and that's the best part about dahlias because you must keep cutting if you want more so you just keep making yourself these beautiful bouquets and bring them in and yeah you know dahlias don't have great vase life in my experience as long as you know if you pick just so you know if you pick a dahlia where the blue where the petals are already starting to go on the back don't expect that to last in a vase more than a day or two max if you pick them when they're right at their prime or like just about to be at their prime they will last the longest then and dahlias don't open up much once they get in a vase so you want them to be they'll open up a touch more but for the most part what you pick is what they're going to look like in the vase so anyway i couldn't be happier with with any of these really it's not been the easiest daily year it's also not been the worst and they do bring me a great amount of joy so i hope you guys have tried growing dahlias if you had a rough year with them hang in there it wasn't a normal year they aren't i'm not going to lie to you they require a little bit more work than some flowers in the garden but to me any amount of work you can put into them well i mean gosh how can you how can you go wrong right all right i hope you guys are having a great day in your garden and we'll catch you soon i've been everywhere but i'm all right now i'm all right i nearly drowned in my own despair but i'm all right now yeah

Channel: The Impatient Gardener

Views: 163,423

Keywords: dahlias, dahlia, flowers, giant dahlias, how to grow dahlias, cut flower, dahlias insects, the impatient gardener

Id: pnWBEcdZ-_8

Length: 25min 45sec (1545 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 04 2020