Happy Friday y’all!

  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 or by perusing through older blog entries on dahlia growing.