Mid-Atlantic Gardening: August blooms, 1 by hart

hart wrote:
Chantell, Love and Peace doesn't have a real strong scent. It makes up for it with the number of blooms and color, though.

Gita, I don't know why you call that your yuk bed either. It looks very nice to me. Many of the dahlias came from a guy named Tod who sends boxes of dahlia tubers for postage every year. Look for his post about it in the dahlia forum in the spring. I've had good luck with cheap clearance priced ones from Walmart too. The big white one and the smaller red and white ones came from there. You might want to try a couple next year.

The Spartacus blooms right now are probably about 8 inches across. They're not quite as big as the huge dinnerplate dahlias. Yes, I have them staked. The tallest plant is probably about 7 feet tall now, most are around 4-5 feet and a couple are much shorter. You put in the stakes when you plant the tubers so you won't damage the roots doing it later.

I've been growing dahlias for years but never had a large garden of just dahlias until this year. I planted around 20 in the new bed, two didn't sprout. A few were planted later after I found a guy clearing out his dahlia tubers for $1-2 on Ebay so they're not ready to bloom yet. Plus I have the three older ones in the kitchen bed. Those have never been dug in winter. They're in a pretty protected spot and make it through the winter every year. I will dig all the others this fall.

They come in all sizes and shapes of blooms and many heights from very short border dahlias to the really tall ones, so you can pretty much find a dahlia for any spot so long as they get plenty of sun.

This seller has lots and lots of nice photos in his photo gallery if you'd like to get an idea of the vast range of colors, sizes, etc.
http://www.dahliasuppliers.com/accent/gallery2/index.htm

This is my new dahlia bed the other day.