gardening at home with sarah | planting out dahlias
In this video Sarah shares an update on the progress of her dahlia cuttings taken a few weeks ago, now planted out in the dahlia trial beds at Perch Hill.
These are our new dahlia beds and you can see this is a whole new area of garden and it's very much a work in progress. This used to be literally a bit of meadow and there was a hedge there which we've taken out to extend our dahlia beds that were on the west side of the hedge right the way over to the east here. And so we've literally times three the size of each bed, so we've got six times the space for our dahlias and we need it because we grow so many dahlias here.
Now the reason I'm sitting in this funny place is this is my cutting of 'Emory Paul' that I did and showed you how to do. They strut really quickly, they had roots coming out the bottom of the pot within three weeks, so I potted them on and they're already out here going out with the tuber grown plants - they've really caught up.
So we planted here 200 plants of dahlias either from tuber or cuttings and they're spaced about 50cm apart with lots of grit and manure added into the soil. They like a rich soil, dahlias, but also they like good drainage so that's why you've got grit and manure and the spacing is as it is. Then we're going to make cages to support them from our own hazel so that we don't need to stake each individual dahlia. I want to bring us back and show you this in sort of July and August when it's all in full flower.
I've quite carefully put together panels of colour and obviously taken height into account so we placed all these over the weekend. Then what happened, having placed 200 plants which took a whole day, is there was a frost forecast so that wasn't ideal. We had to get the fleece out, which you can see over there, last night and the whole lot got fleeced. It was quite windy so we had to weigh everything down and you can see, even with a fleece, a few of them have got slightly scorched but they won't bat an eyelid, they'll just grow away completely fine. So, we'll definitely come back here in mid-summer.
