Dahlia’s are a wonderfully strong, colourful, showy plant that are great for cutting. There are over 50,000 varieties within about 40 species, with 15 recognized colours.
Fall October - November
If you still have dahlias blooming in your garden - great! but they will soon die down with the first frost.
Now is a good time to either:
1. Cut down the stocks and leave the tubers in the ground with as much mulch as you can on top and keep your fingers
crossed for a winter that isn’t too wet and freezing.
Dahlias tubers don’t like being wet and if they freeze they will die.
2. If you’d like to save some of the tubers from your plants now is the time to dig them up, wash them off, divide them, and store them.
You are likely to have between 6-10 tubers from each of your plants.
There is a lot of information on how grow, dig, and store dahlias and I’ll reference my two favourite websites for complete directions.
Floretflowers.com offers a free fall mini course on digging, dividing, and storing dahlias. This is a free course but you have to register. Click on the banner near the top of their website to watch the videos.
I usually wake up my stored tubers early April. If I see an eye growing on the crown I plant them in small to medium pots with good soil until they are ready to plant out in the garden about mid May. Dahlias like to be planted out roughly when your tomatoes do and for our areas and "never before the snow is gone from Mt. Benson." (according to a seasoned grower).
Generally a a water soluble or granular fertilizer or one with a higher nitrogen number can be used until mid summer when the nitrogen should be minimized.
Dahlias are not the favourite food of deer but they are definitely NOT deer proof. I keep most of mine behind a fence but I also have some in unfenced areas in our yard.
If you’d like to buy dahlia tubers from growers in the Nanaimo area the Nanaimo Gladiolus and Dahlia Society has a tuber sale near the end of April at Country Club Mall. When the date has been finalized I will post to the ProIsle Group and you are welcome to contact me there by email for more information.
In closing I’d like to thank all of you who have bought dahlias from my stand. I will continue to do this to raise funds for our local food bank - Loaves and Fishes.
The time has come for me to move my "Lettuce Queen" focus onto other projects, and so I am handing over the growing of our community garden's lettuce to the next Lettuce Monarch who has stepped forward to take on the tossed salad of it all. Currently there are six flats of sprightly spring lettuce babies in the big poly greenhouse at DIGS which need an occasional look-in until March (keep them from freezing or drying out). Hopefully they will not freeze if we can get it together, and others will take over this miniature crop of starters for the winter. Thanks so much for Sheny for offering to do next spring and summer's lettuce crop! Happy news!! :>D
Here is all the best info. on how to grow lettuce below.
I use the West Coast Garden Guide to determine our coastal growing season for lettuce (March through October) and have planted several different varieties to determine the best eating lettuce. It's fun to experiment!
Here was my easy kitchen table method:
On damp ProMix soil/media, sprinkle a few lettuce seeds every couple of weeks. Once the seeds have sprouted, transplant them gently into six packs (36 plants per tray - mix up the colours; make a quilt!) on a table at DIGS, in the shade. Keep them watered and then eventually move each lettuce into a one gallon container or into a raised bed. I even recycled the plant-sale media (old soil) and mixed it with leaf mould to create a no-cost mixture to plant the mature lettuce into their gallon pots. Add a sprinkling of organic pelleted fertilizer; plonk in the lettuce plug. Easy.
Click on pictures to enlarge them.
The biggest enemies of lettuce are slugs and too much heat/sun. So at DIGS we grow them on a shady table (slugs can't jump that high), keeping them safe until they have grown to the hardy size that slugs will leave alone before planting them out into beds around the Community Garden. Anywhere shady is a good bet. We also use Safer's Ferrous Sulphite to get rid of slugs in the raised beds.
- Jim H. has my all the lettuce seeds from this year. We take our seeds home and keep them in the fridge in waterproof containers. Seeds kept dry and cool can last up to ten years.
- some useful lettuce varieties are "slow to bolt" which are great for July and August heat
- some are called "winter lettuce" which tend not freeze until it gets truly icy. Have fun looking at the catalogues.
- most lettuce we grow is leaf-lettuce and we leave it to mature as long as possible so people can pick outer leaves and keep growing the centers.
- also some of the "head lettuce" never actually forms a head at DIGS (the raccoons chomped on the iceburg lettuce just as it was making heads last year, the idiots!) so don't feel bad if you only get floppy leaves. All is beloved. :>)
The most popular lettuce variety last year that did make a head was a little Boston lettuce called "Tom Thumb" (harvest one head per person; so cute!) from West Coast Seeds.
- romaine has been the one most successful head-forming lettuce to grow and is sturdy and resilient.
- eaters also tended to like curly bright lime green leaf lettuces such as "Black Simpson" and "Grand Rapids".
- feel free to purchase seed and get reimbursed or ask Jim & Veronica to order
- pelleted lettuce seed can be very hard to sprout; avoid it unless you really want that variety.
- if you are trying to sprout pelleted lettuce, use wet paper towel between two yogurt lids, and wrap in plastic for three days. Once the pellets split and the seed emerges as a sprout, tweeze out the sprouts gently and plant in moist pro-mix; I also do this with spinach to save time.
Timing:
- As a 55-60 day crop for lettuce you just count back from when you want to harvest and plant on the date 60 days earlier the number you wish to have. I only every planted 20-30 seeds a week or every two weeks to be sure I didn't run out of table or bed space.
Light levels:
- lettuce seeds are stimulated to sprout in the light so do not cover the seeds deeply. I just sprinkle a tiny amount of soil over the seeds, barely covering them.
- lettuce plants can live on 3 hrs. of dappled sunlight a day. At DIGS they get mid-morning light and are shaded for the hottest part of the day by the forest height along that front fence.
Temperatures:
- lettuce loves an average temperature of 10 to 22 C degrees (peak seasons are May-June, and Sept-Oct due to this factor).
- hotter than 23 C in the daytime and it starts to go bitter and bolt, so plan to have baby lettuces ready to replace those going leathery leaved, or which are about to bolt. Baby lettuces can withstand the heat due to youth, but shading material also handy.
- if colder than 10 lettuce starts growing slowly (lack of sunlight will also arrive at same time usually) but as long as it doesn't freeze it can be held at 5 C all winter (Veronica suggests transplanting those six-packs to bigger 4" pots and maybe double cover with Reemay, or keep a lightbulb to create heated greenhouse?). In the spring when the light and heat increase, those over-wintered teenage lettuce will mature rapidly if it doesn't freeze and soak.
- I spoke to Veronica about how to deal with the unheated greenhouse lettuce this year, and we're still looking for some styrofoam to put under the crop, and for Jim to put the winter doors on the greenhouse. (next year we'll have the new heated greenhouse but will have to use sterilized media/pots).
Fertilizer:
- ProMix already has some plant fertilizer in it, apparently.
- once the plants go into six packs a little boost of diluted liquid organic fertilizer can be helpful if plants are yellowing
- when filling the gallon pots (bottom half leaf-mold, top half used pro-mix) I put a scant teaspoon of "Real McCoy" granular fertilizer in each gallon pot right at the lettuce's root level.
Watering:
- in hottest weather it's likely the lettuce will need a good soak once per day. They are 98% water and will wilt, go leathery, stunt, if not kept cool and moist. I used to water at 8-9 am with the hose. The other lettuce beds are looked after by whomever is on the roster. They might need double checking if the person doesn't come every day.
Spacing:
- you can space teenager plants quite densely and then harvest some plants at a younger/smaller stage to let the bigger ones grow into the spaces left.
- if you're getting rid of older lettuce seed packets, you can plant very densely for a square of "cut and come again" mesclun (mixed lettuce types) which can be harvested with scissors and left to grow twice/three times.
Supplies:
- soil and compost at back of garden outside the fence
- pots, Pro-Mix bails, wheelbarrow, and flats/six-packs in brown tent
- organic pelleted fertilizer in Joyce's Greenhouse
