Inspired by the ‘Dahlia grow from seed competition’ organized by the NZ gardener last year, I started my own Dahlia experiment. My Dahlia journey started in Autumn 2022 by collecting seeds from the beautiful pink miniature Dahlia ‘Rembrandt’. This is a very easy low growing Dahlia, I have in our show garden for years. Tubers are left in the ground over winter and every summer they are coming back with an abundance of pink double flowers.
Even though this variety has a double flower, I managed to collect many seeds. I dried them over winter and started my seed sowing the end of August 2022. Seeds were scattered on moist fresh seed raising mix in small punnets, light covered by vermiculite. In around 10 days the first seeds started to germinate and in a couple of weeks the punnets were filled with beautiful healthy seedlings. I nurtured them well and left them in the punnets until they developed into strong little plants. End of September, I potted them up in 7cm pots and the beginning of December in 1L pots. I managed to grow up 70 healthy Dahlia plants. Very exciting!
When I came back from our trip the end of January 2023, my little Dahlia babies had done very well and had developed into beautiful mature plants that even flowered and formed tubers. Look at them!
Interestingly, the off spring has a great variety of colors. From shades of pink to orange, salmon and even white. Definitely a lot of cross pollination had been taken place. I have many different colors of Dahlia’s in my garden and you can see that the bees have done a great job.
