Late bloomers

It may be a little late in the season, but I can officially call my dahlia-growing experiment a success! I have long been wooed by the dahlias growing along the fence that separates my father's yard from his next door neighbor. This neighbor has been growing dahlias his entire life (he is now well into retirement), and his tubers have been passed down from his father. He is known around Bethlehem as the "tuber-man", since come spring he is happy to share his bounty with aspiring gardeners. This year I was one of them.

In early May I received a box of what looked like four dusty sweet potatoes and a couple of photo-copied pages about how to successfully grow 5-foot tall plants with gorgeous flowers out of these objects. Each one had a little label on it: "Smarty Pants", "Fremont's Memory" and "Hissy Fitz" are the three I can remember.

I read and reread the instructions about 20 times. I decided to "bench" the tubers until I could find suitable containers for them. This involved planting them in a shallow bed so that they could develop roots and small plants. The key thing seemed that you didn't want to plant them outside until the soil was warm enough to not shock them. There were also many warnings about overwatering, since that would cause the tubers to rot instead of grow.

Well then it rained all of June. I can't tell you how many times I placed the benched plants outside so they could get a bit of sun, to only have to run outside hours later to rescue them from a torrential downpour. By early July, when they should have been reaching their full heights of four to five feet, my poor little tubers were still not in pots and were better measured in inches, or in Fremont's Memory's case, in millimeters. The fourth tuber had opted to shrivel up instead of grow, so I sadly tossed it when I finally planted the other three.

Well now it is October, and one of my late-summer bloomers developed their first buds about two weeks ago. Of course it was Smarty Pants. Living up to it's name that show-off has led the way the entire time. It also looks like it will probably be the only one to bloom. Hissy Fitz has reached a height of about two and a half feet and has stayed that way since August. Fremont's Memory has been growing steadily since it discovered that ability at the beginning of September, but I doubt there will be enough warm sunny weather for it to reach maturity.

But it's no matter, because this week, Smarty Pants finally bloomed and I got the satisfaction I've been waiting for since April. I grew my own gorgeous dahlia.