How To: Dahlia Cuttings
A Very Beginner's Tutorial
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And before we get into cuttings, if you want to catch up on dahlias, I suggest starting here:
Dahlias ensnare people for many reasons. Some of it’s connected to their baseball card quality (collect them all!); some of it has to do with their persnickety nature (we love a plant that’s hard to grow); a lot of it has to do with their beauty. But some of the addictive quality stems from the various ways you can increase and expand your stock. Every dahlia plant creates tubers (at least if it’s planted correctly) — somewhere between two and twenty. One plant, in other words, can yield up to twenty other plants.
But that’s just from the tubers! You can “wake up” a tuber early in the season, wait for it to sprout, pull off the sprout, and root it. You can do this half a dozen times and then still plant the tuber! This is called taking “pulls,” and it means you could theoretically get 120 plants from that one original tuber. But wait! You can also wait until each plant (including the little mini plants you’ve grown from “pulls”) gets somewhere between 18-36 inches (three-four sets of leaves), chop off the top, and turn that chopped piece INTO ANOTHER PLANT. Which means: 240 potential plants from one tuber……each of which (again, theoretically) will give you between two and twenty tubers at the end of the season. All you need is the actual space to plant them.
Now, there’s all sorts of reasons why people don’t end up with 240 plants from one tuber, beginning with the fact that most dahlia varieties produce more like six to eight tubers instead of twenty (FWIW, I did get twenty from A La Mode in my first year of serious dahlia growing). Also: taking cuttings is not as straightforward as it might seem, at least when you’re first getting started. I’ve successfully rooted close to 150 cuttings this season — and killed just as many. So I’m going to share what’s worked well for me, in my set-up, with my weather, with the caveat that others have found other ways that work best for them.