Dahlias| TIPS & TRICKS // STAKING, DISBUDDING, WATERING// better quality dahlias

chances are if you clicked on this video then you are probably having some quality issue with your dahlias or you might just wanted to learn more in depth about how you can make better quality dahlias the first thing we need to understand is when and why it's happening and the next thing is is how we're going to fix it come on let's go [Music] this is alex the flower guy zone 7b southwest virginia and today we're going to talk about the three top tips that you need to have to make a straight and perfect sim to sell to the florist to sell to your grandma not your grandma but anybody else give them to your grandma and to sell to the whole seller everything that i'm about to show you doesn't mean that it's necessarily going to work for your farm but it can give you a backbone in the structure of how we're doing things here and what i mean specifically by that is check out these t-posts here those might not work for you but you can get that just in the idea it's important to see here just a few things we have tomato string that is is held up here by the t post tied onto each corners of them and we pull them tight with a little bit of tension so that it allows them to move around just a little bit but here's the thing there's a few things that you should not be doing and i'm about to show you what you should not be doing and that's what we're doing here because we don't have the time because we just keep cutting cutting cutting all right these stems here that you are that come outside the stems that are coming outside of your strings is going to be a huge problem because it starts to uh bend the stem and you don't want that you want all of the pro tip here is that you want all of your stems inside of the the strings that you have allowed for them if you have extra string you want to put every six inches above the next one so you'll have six inches segment six inches segment and then you'll have your another string and it goes all the way up depending on your variety you might even have to go five to six foot up the next spot here that we come to this is a perfect example of what not to do i've cut this top string here and look what it allows it to do it just allows them to flop over when you can't even walk through the aisles it allows the the stem to start curving out into whatever direction that it wants to go so in essence it's really not tamed and if you try to tie them back on the top side you'll deal with the fact of closing them in from the upper side which causes them to go out and back in so it kind of looks like a big vase looking thing from both sides so this is a perfect example of what not to do see now you have your stem if you cut the top side here and then you were to have it in here it leans out you snip the top and then you decide that okay we're going to stick it back in here and then it decides that it wants to grow up that's exactly how it's going to look you're going to have a straight stem but it's not going to be worth anything because it's going to be short and then you'll have a big bow right in the middle of it and that's how the majority of all of these are going to look down through here which is a huge problem but when the facts are is you only have but so many hands to be cutting all of these and to try to get through it becomes a lack of a lack of work really and it it really needs to be a priority when those types of things happen this is a big one that people are very timid about and it's to understand of how you break off the side shoots or how you dis bud in proper terms well first of all you have your king bud sitting here that's the bud that you want to keep on your stem so then you have your side shoot sits here and you want to break those off there's a couple different ways of doing this you could also take out your pruners which i have in this case of oasis and you could just go through and with clean with clean pruners you don't want a lot of bacteria on them and you can go through and break off every one of them but the problem is is when you have 12 to 20 000 stems that you're trying to go through that doesn't make it possible for us here so what i do is i go down and i break off the side shoots off the top and leave the king bud remaining then i go down to the next true set of leaves and then you can see that i've already snapped those off here and then i go down one more set in this case i might go down four or five because it has a short length of the the true leaves here so let's go to another one here's a good one to talk about and the reason why i bring this one into the situation is that because it has longer side shoots than any of them that i see that's a lack of coming through and just budding on a current basis because you actually have to go through here almost every day in 1300 dahlias to this bud well for this case i'm going to go ahead and break the side shoots off and i'll show exactly what i'm doing here when you're inspecting your stem you want to be careful not to go too far when you're breaking side shoots now the reason for that is because i go down one set of true leaves two set of true leaves three set of true leaves and i stop about right there if it seems like it's a little bit shorter of a stem then i might go one more but most of the time in that case never so what you're looking for is when you're going down through here is the side shoots you want to break them off but once you go the the bugs are crazy but once you go past the third set of side shoots you want to look down here to see to make sure that you have more because if you do have more then you're going to have more that's going to produce up and you're always going to have a bloom on that specific stem make sure that you're not breaking the side shoots below that because you won't have another flush that comes in and then you'll be stuck with just one bud or stem to one tuber okay this is a prime example of what your stem will look like once you have this budded throughout the season now this one has a little bit of an arch to it and i would assume that it is coming from the head being so heavy but this one is probably about six inches across and these do get to about 10 inches across which is really nice and you want a flat back when you're picking these you want them to be in the flattest section here not kind of arched over if that makes any sense because at that point it's kind of past its prime and they don't really open anymore once you have them to that point anyways to get back to what i was saying here as you have your side shoots that has been broken broken off here and look i went down one two three and in this case i went down one more and i cut right there so that is what gives you a straight stem you want to break your side shoot so that it has all the energy to produce right here this is what you want this is what you want the wow effect to be here's another one this is a first year plant i believe if i'm not mistaken this was off of a clone that i had put a rooted cutting on but you can see here one two three well you get the point and look how long that stem is that's an 18 to 24 inch stem off of a first year plant that's what they're looking for let's talk about t-post real quick i didn't specify much on that but your t-post is your main supports and for this particular project we have put them all the way down the rows about 200 foot and we put them about 15 foot apart next year will be a little bit different we need to close them in put them about 10 foot apart so that you have great support in between all of these rows because you don't want them to be too limber but you want them to be able to move and stretch and grow we put them on each side of the the particular plant and run them all the way down the rows that helps support from left to right we've had high winds we've had rainstorms come through and they haven't really knocked them over the only point of being knocked over is if you accidentally cut a few of these strings when you're trying to go fast and get in there and cut the stems out pretty quick straight sturdy strong stems what do they need water well what we pump our water from is the creek now it's important to know that it's legal to pump your water out of the creek but not into the creek that's the biggest concern that you have there we have a inlet tube that comes from the creek down into there with a filtration system on it and it's got like netting around it so it filters everything that comes into this pump you don't want your butt a bunch of silk coming into here so this is just how we do it there's all different ways it needs to probably have a better box be leveled up a little bit better you don't want a lot of water coming onto this as it rains and you have the outdoor damage onto your pump because these are very expensive what does a dahlia need a dahlia needs about an inch of rain a week in our case to be able to provide the blooms that we're looking for if we follow this blue tube up this will take us to our fields all right now that we have made it up the hill from the creek we need to know that there was a regulator there in between and what that does for us is it allows us not to blow up all of our drip tape system or soaker hoses or if you had some sort of sprinkler out here they need to be regulated so then it goes into our drip tape system on every bed that's individual and they all are pressurized at 40 psi so then you have every cut off here in case one blows off because that happens quite a bit you don't want it to be um have a blowout on all the entire side of your main line coming in like i said you need to have an inch a week on these if it's not raining in our case most of the time we can get about an inch a week here because we have about average rainfall about 50 50 inches here a year on average sometimes it's going to be a little shorter but you'll have your droughts and everything we we need to know that we're ready to take care of the dahlias we have our drip tape system laying on most of the plastic through the aisles and we have little cutouts every 12 to 16 inches what that allows it to do is disperse the water down through and a lot of people are worried about how that you may have some rot i have literally blown off a hose and forgot about it for hours and came back and it was six inches of water and i was concerned about that there would be some rot but as long as you have good drainage and you're healed up on your dahlias it's going to be okay there's not going to be too many concerns because it will warm up it will dry out you

Channel: The Flower Guy

Views: 52,803

Keywords: #garden, #dahlias, #dalhiacare

Id: uKPhnkderDo

Length: 10min 48sec (648 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 28 2021