This text was written by Mandy + Steve O’ Shea of 3 Porch Farms. It is an excerpt from their June 12th blog post: “Verdant Sweepstakes.” Head over to 3 Porch Farms for flower growing tips and tricks from this Georgia flower farm!
We are busy planting thousands of dahlias right now. We’ll be planting them all through June. We stagger the planting so we can have a succession at harvest. It’s important for farmers to succession plant a lot of crops so that they don’t get a huge harvest at one time. That used to be the mistake of a lot of beginning farmers (maybe that’s different now with greater access to information). You’d see them at market one week with a full booth overflowing with beautiful produce or flowers. Then the next 3 weeks, they’d have almost nothing. The result is that customers think you’re unreliable and start shopping elsewhere, and on the week you had a large bounty, you weren’t able to sell all of it, so you either gave a bunch away or lost it to compost. You ended up working your tail off, only to spend more in expenses than you made by selling your bumper crop. A painful lesson to learn. Succession planting becomes a valuable technique to help you have a more steady and reliable harvest that both you and your customers can depend on from one week to the next.
For folks in cooler climates wondering why we plant dahlias so late, it’s an approach we developed after years of failed crops due to intensely hot and humid summers that devastated our dahlia fields. The late planting sidesteps the exhaustive stress that our southern summers exert onto dahlia plants and allow us to have a healthy and bountiful fall harvest. It’s incredibly effective. You can find more info on our dahlia care page
______________________
From 3 Porch Farm’s June 2023 blog:
[June] is the ideal time for southern growers to plant. I know it’s not what the textbooks say, but textbooks weren’t written about growing dahlias in the south. Overwintered, or early spring planted dahlias become huge and exciting for a month or two, give you some very early blooms, and then turn into a jumanji sized, heat stressed, insect hatchery. If you want to propagate thrips and Japanese beetles, then plant early in the south. In our experience, around 90% of your blooms will be ruined for the rest of the summer and all through Fall. The 10% that aren’t destroyed will be subpar.
Also of note if you grow southern dahlias (or any flowers really) and are near a hay field…plant a hedgerow. Thrips love dahlias, but they love grasses even more. When hayfields are cut, millions of thrips are displaced. Those displaced thrips catch a breeze and float on over to whatever gardens and farms are nearby and settle in on the flowers. We have a 100 acres of hay on 3 sides of us. We do have a 15 foot wall of a mix of evergreens, flowering shrubs and vines on 3 sides of us as well. It makes a big difference. Thrips are lazy flyers. They aren’t rising like a phoenix from the ashes, but more like dog paddling until the breeze carries them somewhere. If you stop the breeze, you stop the incursion. If you intend to spray them with your organic or even not so organic insecticides, you’ll still be disappointed. They breed like crazy and have different stages of development that live in the soil, or in the green tissue of the plant. Even the adults that live in the flowers hide deep in the petals to where sprays can’t hurt them. But assuming you nuked them all, the next generation would just turn up the following week. Your only recourse is timing of planting.
Read more about all phases of Dahlia growing – from spring through fall- at 3 Porch Farm’s collection of blogs on Dahlias