Time for dahlias to go in
Ordered the tubers from Farmer Gracy back in winter, then more or less forgot about them until the box turned up. Six varieties, and every tuber in it generous — fat, firm, several eyes each. A thin tuber will still grow, it just spends its first month catching up. Got them in the ground today.
The barrels are old wine halves. Before filling them I treated the wood with järnvitriol — iron sulphate, dissolved in water and brushed on. The iron reacts with the tannin in the oak and the wood goes grey, then close to black, over the following weeks. It's the standard old Swedish way of ageing timber and it costs almost nothing. It also looks wrong at first: wet, it turns a rusty orange and you're certain you've ruined it. I panicked the first time and scrubbed one down before it had finished, which was a waste of a Saturday. Then drilled more drainage holes than seemed necessary, because dahlias sulk in wet feet and a barrel holds a lot of water.
The thing I usually get wrong is picking flowers I like one at a time and ending up with a barrel that looks like a supermarket bouquet. So this time I chose the six as a group.
Café au Lait is the anchor. Six tubers of it, more than anything else, partly by design and partly because it was the one variety I was sure about. Dusty warm cream — in flat light it barely reads as a colour at all, which is exactly the job I want it doing. Around it, Daisy Duke and Labyrinth in the apricot-to-blush range, then Islander and Danique going a good deal deeper into coral.
And Night Queen. Dark burgundy, nearly black in shade, there purely to hold the thing down. Everything else in the barrel is soft, and soft on its own turns sugary very quickly.
Planting itself was nothing clever. A hand's depth down, eye pointing up, compost firmed round them. The bagged compost was bone dry so I watered them in, which some people will tell you not to do — the usual advice is to wait for shoots so the tuber doesn't rot. I've lost tubers both ways and don't think the rule is as firm as it's made to sound. Dry compost doesn't wick.
Slugs are the real problem, not water. Last year they took two plants down to the stem in a single wet week in June and I never got them back.
Dahlias give you almost nothing in May. Right now it's soil, a couple of leaves breaking the surface, and a barrel that hasn't finished going black. Catalogue photographs are lit to sell, and every dahlia in one looks like it was shot at golden hour on its single best day. Whether these six work together I won't know until August.