To pinch or not to pinch is the question
I think I figured out why growing dahlias is so addictive. It is because it is an emotional rollercoaster ride to grow them.
When you start the season, you dream about them for months. You spend hours online searching for varieties and loading your online baskets with way to many new ones. Then you rethink, delete them and rather add them to your wish list. And this all happens in secret, because nobody really want to listen to you dahlia talk. Then when you decide to buy, sometimes late at night, you just bite on your teeth and hit the buy button, knowing all to well that it is double what you were planning on spending. But luckily this is also a secret, because you will never share the true number with anyone, especially not your spouse. And then if you are like me, you get buyers remorse, not about the ones you bought, but about the ones you did not buy. So you go back and buy some more. Unbelievable!
Then the waiting starts, this is the time you spend imagining your new dahlia beds. Planning where you are going to plant your new babies. Emailing the supplier to find out when your order will arrive. And then one morning it happens, the first box arrive on your doorstep. And this is also the only box your family will ever see. The other boxes magically never find their way to your kitchen counter. You open them in your car or when the kids are at school and nobody will ever know that there were more than one box.
The next phase anxiety. Some tubers look dry others might have gall. Nobody you know understand what you are ranting about but luckily there's Facebook. You join the groups and start sharing anonymous photos about what you received and the other addicts confirm that you are not crazy. Now you have to plant them, but you are so scared of loosing them, because they were expensive. For the next few weeks you go out into your garden every morning to check if you see something sprouting. When it rains, you have a panic attack and run around covering your babies so they don't drown. Eventually if you are lucky 70 to 80% survive and begin to flourish. You feel so proud of yourself and you can not believe that you managed to keep them alive.
Then one morning you see the first bud and excitement is at a all time high. But deep down you know you should rather pinch it. You know in the long run you will benefit from this cruel deed, but on the other hand you can not wait to see that first bloom.
This brings me to the main topic of this Newsletter - Pinching. A very long intro, but I also feel important information to share, because pinching is very hard to do after everything you went through up until this point.
I am a firm believer in pinching, but not everyone is. Lets first talk about what happens if you do not pinch. Everybody knows that plants are living things and all they want to do is survive and multiply. So a dahlia will focus on making tubers and making seed, all for the survival of the species. After planting, your dahlia tuber will produce a main shoot. This shoot will grow very tall until it produces a flower. If you leave the flower on the shoot to get pollinated, it will develop seeds and the bloom will start to loose its petals, the seed pod will become swollen and turn green. When the seeds are ripe, the seed pod will turn brown and eventually it will dry out, open up and the seeds will fall to the ground. Once the plant made seeds the flower production will slow down because it accomplished what it set out to do in the beginning. Survive.
This is not what we want the plant to do. We want lots of blooms to enjoy all season long. The best way to do that is to pinch the plant after it produced 3 to 4 sets of leaves. With some varieties this is the same place on the plant where it will produce its first bud. But you have to pinch that bud.
Pinching dahlias encourages bushier growth, more flowers, and stronger plants.
Bushier growth: When you pinch the grow tip it encourages the plant to branch out. At every leaf node on the stem below the pinch point a lateral branch will start to grow, in other words, at every leaf you will have a new branch with a grow tip (6 to 8 branches) and your plant will become bushier with more leaves to photosynthesize.
More flowers: Pinching redirects the plants energy to lateral buds, so at the end of each of the the 6 to 8 branches your plant will develop a flower. So in stead of 1 flower you will end up with 6 or more flowers. The flowers will take a few weeks longer to develop but it is so worth it in the long run. You can get anywhere between 18 to 30 flowers in a season.
Stronger plants: Dahlias are prone to fall over or loose branches during the season. Especially the varieties which grow very tall and produce large blooms. With strong winds and rain your plants can brake or fall over. If the plant was pinched when it was young, the plant will not grow tall and lanky and thus will be a stronger plant.
You should also now start considering how you are going to support your plants. I think that all dahlias that grows higher than 80cm should have support. Some people used wooden poles. bamboo or steel rods. Anything that you can tie your plant on to when they are fully grown later in the season. I use horizontal support net that I put up after I plant my tubers. If a plant grows 100cm high I will put my net at 2 thirds the way in other words at 67/70cm. All my plants gets pinched before they reach the net and then the new branches grow through the net organically. If you are growing dahlias for cut flower production you should pinch twice. I pinch after 3 leaf sets and then again after the news shoots reaches the net. This is usually just as the second set of buds appear. So when I see the second buds I pinch them too. Then you can just imagine how many stems you have to harvest from after that. But it will make your plant bloom a month later.
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