Jourdan's Personal Dahlia Festival

Although Jourdan lost about 1/3 of his tubers due to the wet spring and early summer we had, we are finally enjoying the dahlias he plants for us.  For those of you who are unfamiliar with the process, I'll just briefly let you in on HOW this all comes about.  Last fall, Jourdan spent a couple of days digging up the tubers, washing them, letting them dry, re-labeling them, dividing them, and then storing them in newspaper and peat moss until the spring.  This litererally took two days of work; he has 35 varieties of dahlias, and several tubers of each type, so it's a time consuming process.  Then in the spring, he painstakingly uses little pictures we've cut from the catalog to sort his tubers into groupings by color, bloom size, and growing height.  (You can't plant a 5 foot dinner plate dahlia in front of a 3 foot pom pon variety; not if you want to see them.)  Then he digs all the holes, mixes in peat moss and bone meal, and plants each tuber.  As the plants come up, he stakes them because some of the flowers just get way to huge to be supported by their stems alone.  Here's a sampling of his dahlias (so far) this season.  Due to the late start, this is only a small portion of his collection; hopefully, we'll be able to update the photos later....if the frost doesn't kill them first. 

Jourdan's front yard color-coordinated grouping.

Sugar Lips (below)

Little Missy

September Morn

Park Princess

Getts Perfection (dinner plate variety - it's huge, the size of a dinner plate)

Sugar Lips (another shade mutation)

Midnight Moon

E Z Duzzit

Wheels (a light red version)

Dare Devil

Bodacious (this is a dinner plate variety - literally the size of a large dinner plate)

All triumph

Fuzzy Wuzzy

Vassio Meggos (also the size of a dinner plate)

Little Missy

September Morn (another shade variety)

Fire Magic

Black Satin

We're crossing our fingers for more warm weather.  Also, we hope that the flowers are not attacked by small children with soccer balls, baseball bats, and other tools of destruction.  By the end of the month, we will be starting that lengthy process all over again to prepare the tubers for winter storage.  If you live in town, you're welcome to visit his garden, he'd love to give you a tour.