These will soon be rooted up and well on their way to being full plants

Get out the scalpel

Damn these buggers grow fast! Less than a week after we put the tubers on the benches and they'd already started to throw off new shoots so it was time for Barry to get his scalpel out. Different people grow dahlias in different ways. Some, like The Mighty V, just leave the tubers in the ground and let them regrow ( if they survive ) the next year, but the plants start looking crap by the third year, so I'm always replacing them with fresh ones. Others, mainly the yanks I believe, split the tubers into individual "chicken legs" and then plant each of them up, which allows them to get about 1/2 dozen or so off each parent plant. We just throw the whole tuber into a tray, water it and then take cuttings .... lots of cuttings ... from the first flush off about a dozen Trelyn tubers we've already taken 70+ cuttings, which is about all we need for this year, but we could easily get a couple of hundred more if we needed them.

When you take cuttings it's really important to to make the cut directly below a leaf joint as this is where next years cuttings will come from, assuming you want to take cuttings next year of course but we always do. They're easy enough to root up, if you have some rooting powder then just dip them in that and them slap them in some seed compost. If you haven't got any rooting powder then just slap them in some seed compost. If you haven't got any seed compost then just slap them in some compost ... as I said, it's real easy ... then stand welllllllllllllll back, because these buggers grow like there's no tomorrow.

Each of the trays holds 77 cuttings, so we're about half way there

The greenhouses

The large greenhouse is now cleared, so during this week I'll be rotovating it ready for sterilising the beds next week. Then I'll be doing the same in the small greenhouse which means that I need to get all my seedlings hardened off ready to move into the top end of the large greenhouse so that they don't get killed as well. It's taking me a fair tad longer this year than normal as I've been a smidge ill for the last few weeks and haven't really had the energy needed, but we seem to be winning so far. I'll also be dropping the sides on the large greenhouse to help keep the warmth in and the wind out as the sterilising agent needs the soil to be over 10°C before it's active ... cool, I'll be in my shorts in no time :D

¥

We finally started!

We finally got round to sparking off the dahlia tubers this week although, like everything else to do with the dahlias this year, we're a fair tad behind as some of them should have been started a month ago. Unlike growing veg, or non-show flowers, this may come back to bite us on the arse as everything about their life cycle is strictly timed and we may have just irreparably screwed up that timetable, it pretty much comes down to how fast they start to throw cuttings. With a tad of luck everything will work itself out in the long run but if it doesn't then it's not the end of the world as we're less interested in showing this year due to other time constraints, so it's mainly about preserving our varieties. The fact that this is also our last year as world champions, and we have no hope of defending our title as they're being held in Canada this year, doesn't really help I guess.

And they're off!

I've been around dahlias for years, so I *know* how much they can change from day to day .. hell, sometimes you feel that if you sat there quietly enough then you could actually watch them grow ..... but the speed that the tubers have started throwing shoots is pretty impressive to say the least! We've only had the tubers on the beds for a week and already the majority of them are throwing shoots, even the mary's and bryn's which are normally a tad on the lethargic side when it comes to recognising that it's a new year.

¥

We don't normally enter!

Yeah, it's showtime! Usually we don't have enough flowers to enter the Southport Flower Show as the majority of our blooms are timed to come out the week later when all the serious championship events take place, but this year all the shows are in a very brief period, the majority of the ones that we enter are done and dusted 3 weeks from now! So, we went to Southport with a few blooms ... and trounced them :D .... I can't wait until they realise that Barry thought we had some right crap flowers ( the first ones usually are ) and that we should have far better for the rest of the shows .... maybe they should just all give up now? ;)

As usual Barry and Wendy set off with a van full of flowers and came back with a van full of trophies. Of course the only reason that we ever win is to down to my dedication to bimbling and absolutely nothing to do with the fact that they actually know one end off a flower from the other. Such is the burden I must bear :roll: Of course the fact that we're into the showing season means that the large and samll greenhouses are now filled with some fantastic dahlias .... several of which are planted in the wrong spot, glad I'm not the one that labels the cuttings! ... The downside is, it hasn't really been sunny enough to truly appreciate the time that I spend with them every day. Whilst they cheer up even the most grim day, they really look there best when the suns shining and your sat amongst them with a beer and a smoke, reading a good book .... of course you have to get up every now and then to turn the next irrigation system on ... but it's worth the hardship :D

Our next show is tomorrow, Barry's picking our entries as I'm typing this, but I'll get some pics before he sets off. I'll also be able to update you with the show pictures a lot sooner as well, as this show is our own Societies show and is being held in Lancaster, which is just up the road from here. For now you'll just have to drool over last weeks flowers ;)

¥

It's the most used icon on our weather maps :|

I've not made a post for ages because I've been busy recoding my gallery plugin to make the whole process shedloads less manual and a lot more idiot friendly ... although I'm currently the only idiot using it ;) ... I've also had the ballache of recoding the demo magento skin to make it work with the release version of the software .... ah well, at least it'll be a very custom skin I suppose .... anyway, enough about coding, this post is meant to be about the field.

As usual we've had a fair amount of mixed weather, about all we haven't had is hail, thank god it's summer huh? Whilst rain isn't exactly my idea of perfect shorts weather, hell it's not even my idea of "go outside" weather, at least it put our new drainage system to the test ... it passed with flying colours ... in fact, all of the beds are in pretty good nick this year. Anyway, seeing as I had to go water the beds that were already under cover, I decided to nick Gary's camera and take a few pics.

Wow! a ball of fire in the sky!

In all fairness to the weather, the sun has *almost* managed to fulfil it's contractual duties of 12 hours of sunshine for summer ... of course, we hoped it'd do it all in one day, not spread it over several weeks :-S. Ahhh well, at least I got some good photos that didn't involve water

¥