10 Sep 2007 - More dahlia flowers?

Many types of plants benefit from dead heading. This is the removal of any flowers that have seen better days. This very often prolongs the flowering period and causes the plant to develop more flowers. The flower is the plant’s seed making machine and once flowers have been allowed to set seed many plants decide that the job is done and stop producing flowers.

Dead heading dahlias means that you will have a supply of cut flowers for the house for a much longer period. As dahlia blooms are large, dead flowers also look very unsightly and spoil the look of the plant even if you don’t like to cut them.

Once the petals have fallen, many people mistake dead dahlia flowers. So is that a bud or a dead flower

The photographs below show dead flowers.  So number 2 on the above photo is a dead flower

The photographs below show buds that have yet to open. So number 1 is a bud

Dead heading is probably not a very good description of the process as you should really remove the flower and the stem down to where a new shoot is forming. Cut just above the new shoot to encourage new growth and new flowers.

Dahlias can provide flowers for the house from about July until the first frosts. One problem however, is that dahlias tend to make the water in the vase smelly and a produce a scum on the sides of the vase. I put small amount (I suppose it amounts to about a teaspoonful) of bleach into the water which prevents this from happening and surprisingly doesn’t affect the flowers. Our other problem is that some of the flowers on our plants are just too huge for the house. I suppose if you live in a mansion with large rooms they may be OK but we don’t! We just content ourselves in admiring them on the plot.