Happy Friday y’all!

I’m writing this Thursday night, cause days are for diggin’. We’re rolling deep in the fields this week with almost the whole crew on hands and knees digging tens of thousands of dahlia tubers out of the ground in an attempt to beat the coming cold. Dahlias can sometimes survive cold temps in the ground, but if the ground freezes hard enough, they’ll freeze too, then rot.

We’re looking at temps in the teens this Sunday night, so are at risk of losing everything that we don’t get dug, organized, and stored in our root cellar before then. It’s a race we didn’t know we were running until two days ago, but the gang’s all hustling and we’re on track to get it done.

Backs, necks, legs, fingers, and forearms are all sore at this point. Mandy’s got the chilblains acting up from being out in the cold too. Nasty little ailment. She froze the toes a little too hard during the early days of the farm and has been haunted by it every winter since. She’s got em under a heating pad as I write this.

The basement is stacked floor to ceiling with crates of dahlias. Some of you ask about how to store them each year. There’s a ton of recommendations out there, and we’ve tried a lot of them. We’ve settled on a technique we don’t see mentioned often, but we just literally leave them dirty and piled in bulb crates. We knock the mud clumps off out in the field and cut the stems off, but don’t wash them at all. We feel like the remaining dirt acts as a buffer for the changes in humidity that they’ll face in storage.

We don’t put them in sawdust. We don’t put them in airtight containers. We find that in our basement, stored like this, they’ll last perfectly all the way until next May. If humidity gets too low, we’ll add some humidity to the room. If the basement gets wet or flooded, we’ll add a dehumidifier. We also elevate the bottom layer of crates, so they are up above puddles, flood water, or even just moisture from the ground.

Low maintenance, but we check in occasionally. Don’t let them mold. Don’t let them desiccate. That’s it. Your results may vary depending on your conditions, so always experiment with different approaches and find what works best for you. If you don’t wanna dig them up and store em, I don’t blame ya. It’s a lot of work.

If you’re new to dahlias and are hoping to perennialize them, do note that if you manage to get them through winter without them rotting, you can get multiple years of flowers out of them, but yield and size of flowers will diminish after year 2. They want to be dug up and divided. You risk buildup of pathogens in the soil too over time. It’s highly recommended if you are growing to pay the bills, to dig and divide each year.

If you’re digging by hand, a pitchfork is how we always did it in the past. These days, we’re digging by hand. I put an undercutter blade on the tractor, and it undercuts the bed to loosen the soil. I drive a foot forward while cutting, then raise the blade, push it back down, drive another foot, raise the blade, and so on and so on. This really breaks the soil into manageable chunks so we can dig our fingers in and wrestle the tubers out.

Mandy has pained flashbacks of an early year when I was significantly injured and her and Edwin did an acre and a half all by themselves with just pitchforks. No tractor to assist. Just long day after long day of digging and pulling. Piling and filling. Lifting and carrying. Stacking and transporting. From the field to the house. Then lifting and carrying down the crumbling and slippery dirt stairs. One by one. Again and again. Then stacking in the basement and climbing back out for what must’ve seemed an endless week. I remember them both literally crawling out of the field at the end of that run, looking tattered and beaten. Eyeing my injury with perhaps a hint of envy.

If you’d love to avoid all of this, you’re in luck.  We sell dahlia tubers.  You can pre-buy tubers for spring shipping now.  We’ll deal with the rest.

For locals thinking of holiday gift giving, the Farm Store is open for one more week!  This weekend and next week with extended days, Tuesday thru Sunday, before closing until spring.  For the rest of you, we’ve got flower subscriptions and gift cards that are perfect gifts.

That’s all from me. It's late and me eyes are drooping. I hope you have a wonderful weekend. Drip your faucets and protect your plants if you’re in north Georgia this Sunday!!

Steve