This post should have been all about steralising the beds in the main greenhouse, but the local kids decided that my posts needed livening up. With this in mind they amused themselves by throwing bricks at the small greenhouse. After putting through three of the panes at the back and almost putting a couple through the roof, they wandered off content....... It's a bloody good job we never caught them or we'd be in prison by now :|

Follow up:

The local kids amuse themselves with bricks

We'll soon fill this space

Apart from the destructiveness, which is bad enough, we also have the problem of all the broken glass in the beds. There's nothing worse than planting up by hand and ending up needing stitches because you've just found a piece of glass that was missed whilst clearing up after their fun. Luckily for us the majority of the beds were already covered, so we only have a small patch where we need to take care whilst planting.

Anyway, weeds and sterilisation. This year, for the first time, we decided that we'd sterilise the beds so that we can start from a weed free environment. Although weeds don't stand much of a chance against dahlias when it comes to the battle of the ground, they do manage to get a tad of a foothold before we let the dahlias grow big enough to fight them into submission. Now that most of the beds in the main greenhouse are sterilised, there's not a lot that we can do in there for the next 4 to 6 weeks as the beds need to remain covered whilst the white powder works it's magic

Under wraps for the next few weeks.

Hundreds of cuttings waiting to be taken.

The potting shed is a tad on the full side now. We've got well over a thousand cuttings that are almost ready to pot on, and a fair few hundred that are already potted on. As soon as we've repaired the small greenhouse we'll be moving all of the potted on ones into it as we really are running out of bench space at an extraordinary rate, and there's still hundreds of cuttings waiting their turn to be taken!!

There's not really a lot to do for the next few weeks. We basically just have to sit back and wait for the sterilisation process to finish, and then it'll be all hands to the pumps to get the beds ready for planting up ..... damn, it'll be good to see them full of dahlias again. I really can't wait to see what all the new varieties look like.

Anyway, I suppose it's time I bimbled down to the field and finished clearing up after the kids.

Have fun,
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