The dahlias of Australia,
Will never ever fail ya.
... or so I used to believe.
A decade ago I thought that while New Zealand's dahlia bushes might be larger, size isn't everything. New Zealand's dahlia bushes have a longer blooming season than ours too, unless cared for by a dedicated gardener with a hose. But our Canberra-region dahlias are tough, I thought, surviving everything from frost, neglect, drought, heatwaves, to even the more wimpish kind of bushfire.
I was wrong.
Dahlias are still one of the most stubborn bloomers in our climate. They may not flower much in a dry season but those big tubers give dahlias the resources to survive a truly terrible year, and often several.
The dahlias in our garden sailed through at least five major droughts. Some put out leaves but almost no flowers. Others didn't bother to peep out of the ground till it rained. But once the rain came back, so did the dahlias.
I have a feeling our dahlias would have survived the last drought too, if we'd protected them from starving possums and wallabies. After two years of having every new shoot nibbled, many dahlias vanished for good, especially the giant dinner-plate dahlias and those giant multicoloured balls which straddle the line between "extravagantly gorgeous" and "too much!" The neat little 30-centimetre dwarf dahlia bushes disappeared too
The great survivors were the single dahlias. By the second year of rain they were madly blooming with glorious abundance. Those I remembered to feed gave even more splendour, from late spring well into winter.
But our dahlias are all in extremely well drained soil. The last three wet years have shown that dahlias don't survive soggy soil, including clay soil where the water pools around them and doesn't drain away fast enough.
If you're not sure if your site is well drained, dig a hole, and fill it with water. If the water is still there three minutes later, don't plant dahlias - or any other bulb - till you've built an above-ground garden, at least 50 centimetres above that band of clay or rock or shale.
Actually the most common dahlia fatality is from poor tubers that never emerge from the soil at all because they were too small to be separated, or damaged before planting, or kept in plastic too long and began to rot. Fat, sturdy and unwrinkled is fantastic when it comes to buying dahlias.
And I have just bought some dahlia tubers. I know I promised not to plant more ornamentals this year, given the probability that anything I plant won't get enough water is uncomfortably high. But these dahlias were locally bred, and they are purple, impossible to resist. If this season is really bad I'll cover the dahlias with chook wire - not bird betting, as snakes get caught in it, and neither the snakes nor I want to deal with the consequences.
This year our dahlias will survive, and with just a bit of water will be in full magnificence by Christmas, and for a hundred summers to come.
This week we are:
- 'Tickling the soil', an old term for scratching out the tiny end of winter weeds that become enormous by mid spring. Bare ground you're making ready for spring planting needs at least three weeks of 'tickling' to be relatively weed-free before you put in seeds or seedlings. You can cover the bare soil with clear plastic instead, so the weed seeds germinate then rot.
- Discovering self-sown carrot seedlings springing up already, though they'll probably go to seed before they have a chance to 'carrot'.
- Digging up all last season's carrots except two well-staked for seed. Home-grown carrots are so vividly coloured that everything they're cooked with turns yellow, so probably have twice the commercial ones' health qualities.
- Sighing as half the garden blooms far later than usual because it's dry, while the other half springs into leaf and blossom too early. A late pruning sets back flowering, so this is the time to prune roses, fruit trees and anything you don't want cut by a late frost.
- Still competing with the broccolini. I win by daily picking every tiny broccoli-like clump, perfect for blanching then tossing into a salad or through pasta with olive oil, lemon, pine nuts and currants. The broccolini wins if it manages to turn a clump into yellow flowers, which will stop veg production.
- Watching our 'lawn' turn patchwork - green where it's watered, gold where it isn't.
- Planning a compendium of rain dances that didn't work last time, so aren't worth wasting time with now.
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