Behind the Scenes: Planting 500+ Dahlias
Last year, my best friend on the island and I asked ourselves: do we want to transform large swaths of our property into a dahlia micro farm? Do we want to learn a bunch and fail a bunch and allocate physical and financial resources to this project? We live in a small corner of Washington state that is home to some of the most renowned breeders and growers in the country.
Our climate is perfect for it. Our soil is pretty great. We both love dahlias and love organization and love figuring out new things — and we’re both somewhere in the portal. So we decided: sure, why not. We’ll sell stems on the road in our tourist-heavy island; we’ll (eventually) sell tubers; we’ll mostly just revel in growing something that has nothing to do with our everyday work.
We’re only six months in, but it’s been complicated and fun and gratifying — and last week, we had a glorious weekend of “planting out” the mix of baby dahlia plants, pre-sprouted-tubers, and tubers still in the process of waking up. Our partners/husbands, Beth’s kids, and our friends’ kids all came and helped match the tubers/plants to the name plates already in the ground. Our strategy was to quasi-alphabetize everything in long lines, then match away.
I’m here to answer any questions about the process but here’s a short list of things I/we did to get to this point: