thanksgiving part 2: the second helping
Nov. 29th, 2024 09:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
twoeleventoday's menu changes: carrots out, sautéed green beans in. and we started in on the wild rice. i think we overdid it with all the starches, but it was worth it.
before we turned into bloated, waddling blobs, i lifted my dahlia. it's going to get well below freezing tonight, and we've already had a killing frost, so it had to come out today. the low will be 27°, which might be enough to freeze the crown. while some tubers might survive, that's probably the end of the plant, and i didn't want to risk it.
this one was a new one, because last year's drought while we were on vacation mortally wounded the two from the previous years. one made it to the end of last summer, but it wasn't in good shape. i planted the scrawny tubers that were left, but it never came up, which i figured would happen.
it looks like i never posted about this one before. so, here, have a picture of one blossom that started out a little different from the rest of them:
it eventually looked more like the others, but the side view still shows that it had only a little white early on.
the dahlia did extremely well this year, meaning that it has a huge clump of tubers. i wanted to get them out intact, so i spent about two hours grubbing around the tubers with my fingers, exposing them all and loosing their roots so i could lift it out.
part of the problem was that some of my saffron crocuses had grown up around it, so there were lots of roots, and lots of corms. that made finding the bottom of the clump challenging.
i also had to rip out a lot of grass that grew into the garden bed. so, i replanted the saffron a bit crudely by loosely planting the corms, tossing some topsoil over them and then covering it all with inverted tufts of grass, followed by loose grass i'd ripped out to get a good grip on the rest of the grass to rip it out.
now these are happy tubers:
oddly, even though they're large tubers, and there are lots of them, none of the tubers have any eyes. so, i don't think i can divide this clump.
i'm going to have to talk to somebody who knows more about dahlias to see if can divide it, and if so, into how many pieces. i'd like at least two pieces, so we'll have two mature dahlias next year. if i can get a third, it's probably going to my oldest friend, since she's also a gardener. if there's a fourth piece, maybe that will be up for grabs. maybe.
before we turned into bloated, waddling blobs, i lifted my dahlia. it's going to get well below freezing tonight, and we've already had a killing frost, so it had to come out today. the low will be 27°, which might be enough to freeze the crown. while some tubers might survive, that's probably the end of the plant, and i didn't want to risk it.
this one was a new one, because last year's drought while we were on vacation mortally wounded the two from the previous years. one made it to the end of last summer, but it wasn't in good shape. i planted the scrawny tubers that were left, but it never came up, which i figured would happen.
it looks like i never posted about this one before. so, here, have a picture of one blossom that started out a little different from the rest of them:
it eventually looked more like the others, but the side view still shows that it had only a little white early on.
the dahlia did extremely well this year, meaning that it has a huge clump of tubers. i wanted to get them out intact, so i spent about two hours grubbing around the tubers with my fingers, exposing them all and loosing their roots so i could lift it out.
part of the problem was that some of my saffron crocuses had grown up around it, so there were lots of roots, and lots of corms. that made finding the bottom of the clump challenging.
i also had to rip out a lot of grass that grew into the garden bed. so, i replanted the saffron a bit crudely by loosely planting the corms, tossing some topsoil over them and then covering it all with inverted tufts of grass, followed by loose grass i'd ripped out to get a good grip on the rest of the grass to rip it out.
now these are happy tubers:
oddly, even though they're large tubers, and there are lots of them, none of the tubers have any eyes. so, i don't think i can divide this clump.
i'm going to have to talk to somebody who knows more about dahlias to see if can divide it, and if so, into how many pieces. i'd like at least two pieces, so we'll have two mature dahlias next year. if i can get a third, it's probably going to my oldest friend, since she's also a gardener. if there's a fourth piece, maybe that will be up for grabs. maybe.