Small flowers on Dahlias

I have probably 10 varieties of Dahlias. All of them overwintered. Been doing that for several years.

ALL of them have small flowers (so far) this year. Even my David Howard that normally has dinner-plate sized flowers.

Cool spring maybe? (Although they weren't planted out until June)

Any ideas please?

Haven't given them a liquid feed as yet ... I'll do that shortly. Foliage looks healthy enough.

 

Mixed bag here, some are mahoosive like the cactus and Pom Pom types, but some are smaller than last year, but the plants themselves are a great height! Been feeding them on tommy food, phostrogen and MG.
shed loads of earwigs this year too, as well as caterpillars, much more than last year.

 

Are you not suppose to dis bud Dahlias if you want large flowers?
I think that is what the show people do.

I've never done it myself, but maybe if you removed just a few as the bunch of buds are forming you might get bigger flowers.

 

Yes, Show gardeners do do that, but I don't bother in the border. Its just that the flowers that I have got are small, and also not very "vivid" in colour - compared to previous years.

Just seems odd that having put up a decent plant they are then, all, not flowering as vigorously as usual.

 

Are you watering them like crazy, I bet you are.
But it's just a thought, they hate being dry.

 

That's a good point, thanks. We had a very dry spell and they may have suffered during that. Since then we have had rain, but I'll make sure they are on the watering circuit from now on.

 

Dont know about you Kristen, we get rain, but not the kind that makes a difference, had a 5 min shower this morning.
Now the sun is out and 25C.
I love it,
but I'm now getting to the point where I put the hose at the roots of some plants and just leave it for an hour or so.

 

That's what most of our rain is. East Anglia being the driest part of the country, I believe. However, we have had some decent rain over the last few weeks. Obligingly we have had one-deluge-per-week (which I thought was a fair price for the sale of my Granny )

I'm in the process of putting in some bigger water storage (for next year onwards) and contemplating the best way of getting it to the plants. We mostly use leaky hose at present, which is fine for hedges, and big plants (we have a circular ring, or two circuits, of leaky hose around each tree and then a normal hose connecting to another leaky hose ring around the next one). That's no good for Annuals and Herbaceous though ... I am wondering about straight lengths of leaky hose a foot, or so, apart to just soak the soil, or whether I should have something that gets the water more directly to the plant (although I think one dripper per plant too fiddly, even for me!), or just a travelling sprinkler that "walks" down the path and soaks the beds on either side (probably would use far more water than I would want to put on though)

 

You are doing it on a much larger scale than me Kristen, so you need to find other ways.

 

I take it you aren't coming round to help then?

 

Have you dug them up and split them over winter? Or restarted them into growth in a box of multi-purpose in spring and taken cuttings?

If not, it just may be that the tubers are just tired and need a new generation to spark them back into live?

 

What!!!!! with my back, you must be joking.

 

These are stored tubers. Some were cuttings taken last year (so stored for the first time), others really nice big tubers a couple or three years old. All started off in individual 4L or 5L pots, a few in smaller pots, under glass and planted out at the end of May.

Cuttings taken this year are still in pots being grown on as, with the cold spring, they are behind where they would normally be and in order to overwinter them I decided they needed to grow on much more than was likely to be the case if I planted them out.

There are probably about 100 plants - at a guess 10 plants each of 10 varieties - none of them, so far, have what I would say were decent sized flowers. Some of the Bishop of Llandaff have a few petals missing and aren't making a decent rosette, for example. I'd understand it better it if was one or two plants ... but it seems to be the lot. They are planted over 5 separate beds / areas of the garden, so unlikely to be soil in any one place (and the rest of the herbaceous plants around them look fine).

I'm going to go with Pete's comment about watering. They probably didn't get as much water as I should have given them during the dry spell end of June / July. I'll give them a liquid feed this weekend and see if that perks them up.