Gardening is a never-ending learning process

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Maybe that’s why it’s so good for us. Gardening is well known to be good for both physical and mental health, and it certainly does keep you looking forward all the time, and learning new things. I’ve been growing things almost as long as I can remember, I’m a bit of a plant obsessive, and yet I’m always learning something new! For the last three or four years I have grown dahlias from seed, and they do make cheery bright flowers. Dahlias have come back into fashion over the past couple of decades after falling from favour in the 1970s and 80s. I remember my great uncle was a keen dahlia grower, planting boxes of tubers each spring. His domain was the vegetable plot, and so presumably for that reason, or because they needed to be dug up every autumn, he grew them in rows among the potatoes and beans. I well remember him taking me and my mother to admire their big colourful pom-pom heads (I would have been 4 or 5). I have often seen packets of dahlia seed offered for sale as garden annuals. And I have seen tubers for sale as well. But I thought they were different things - certainly the types sold as tubers seem to be different varieties to the types sold as seed. But I now find that if you grow a dahlia from seed, it forms a tuber which can then be dug up and stored in a frost-free place and will re-grow a bigger and earlier plant the following year. Am I the only one who didn’t realise this? Having found that out I gave it a try and so far most of the seven tubers I stored and replanted are sprouting and looking good. Presumably if I do this every time I grow new plants I will have an ever-expanding collection! That just leaves the question of where to put them all….. All rights reserved. © Text and image copyright Fleur 2022.