Starting Dahlias

I put around 50 bundles of tubers in the fridge for Winter storage, and it’s about time to get them started.

I grabbed an assortment and put them on some warming pads in the dark. The goal was to just wake them up and get the eyes sprouting, so that I’ll have a better idea of which tubers are going to be viable.

About a week later I unwrapped the bundles and put the best candidates into baggies with some damp potting mix, and put them under lights to get them growing. I also turned on the lights on the shelf underneath them to add some warmth from below.

As hoped, several of them are already sprouting.

So far I haven’t had any tubers come out of storage soft or rotten, but then again this was only the first batch.

As in recent years, I’m using a potting mix that’s 4 parts coconut coir and 1 part “Ocean Forest”. I’ve found that the tubers sprout really well in this, I lose very few to rot, and since the mix is mostly coir I hardly get any fungus gnats flying around.

The starter bags are just regular sandwich bags, with some small drain holes punched near the bottom in case the mix gets too wet.

I also put a second batch from the fridge on the warming pads.

Complicating matters is that a lot of the ones I didn’t bother digging up for storage didn’t freeze and die over Winter. A lot of them are coming back on their own, which means fewer places to put the ones from the grow racks.