I'm finally getting around to doing what I should have done in the autumn when I first dug up all my allotment dahlias and brought them home: Washing and Dividing them.

I have a poor history of overwintering dahlias anywhere other than in the ground, the traditional methods of washed tubers in the garage? Molded Mush. Tubers in Vermiculite in the garage? DRIED HUSKS. Tubers in the Fridge? MUSH MUSH MUSH. I am simply too adhd for the ongoing maintenance and dedicated set up required of traditional dahlia tuber storage. That level of care from me requires dedicated a dedicated set up and ease of use that I just can't hit at my current income level.

HOWEVER. I have managed this year using the potting method of overwintering dahlias which is like a lazy persons version of the traditional tubers in vermiculite. You put your dahlia tubers in pots and then someplace cold but not too cold. Since my garage is currently a storage room of logs and ???? (idk whats all in there but is full of probably important stuff?) I opted to grab one of those super cheap $100 build it yourself 3x5 metal shed kits and just stuffed every tuber into what pots I had on hand in whatever soil medium I had and then all of them went into the shed.

Surprisingly this worked and most of the tubers stored this way survived in good shape till now (MARCH) when I started pulling them out to see if they were ok and actually taking them out to divide them and put them in decent potting media.

I did learn several things for fellow lazy dahlia keepers which may help in your own dahlia storage ventures.

First, Assuming you don't get full hard freezes pots of reasonable size (5 gallons or more) can overwinter dahlias exposed on a patio you just need to make sure you have a good soil medium and distance from the top (deeper) is more important than distance from the sides. The only frost damage i had was on the tops of tubers that were closer to the surface even if the side of the pot was closer.

Second, your shelter is mostly protecting from wind chill! The shitty little shed and even my pop-up tarp-green house has been enough to keep the chill off. This may not be true of colder areas that consistently go below freezing, but it worked here in 8a.

Thirdly, the choice of potting medium matters but most do pretty well. Store bought Potting Mix performed the best followed by my own mix made of cococoir, leaf mold, and composted poultry bedding (wood shavings bird poos), followed by potting soil, and then the sharp drop off was where I had barely mixed anything with the clay soil from the allotment, the tubers were salvageable but definitely worth washing off any clay for a potting mix of any kind.

When dividing dahlias it can be confusing how to get the best results b/c different folks will give different answers most of them include "eyes". Some folks say its fine as long as there is a bit of stem on there but they are usually doing mass divisions or cutting divisions with active or recently active plants. If you are like me and are usually too late or too early for certain types of divisions the easiest division method I've found is a mix of eyes and stalk.

Eyes are the little nubbins where the tuber attaches to the stem where potential new stalks will grow. For me trimming the stalk down and then cutting the stem in half and then down through the tuber roots (trying to keep as many tubers intact as possible) is the most surefire way for a division to succeed no matter when you do it.

Eyes won't always be as clear as the ones above which were kind enough to have a little green nub of thinking about growing. This is why washing the tubers is really helpful as you can sometimes miss eyes that have a higher collar than nub, or a nub that looks like its just texture on the stem. Like in the above picture. You can also spot tubers that are going off like the middle long one above h as some kind of freeze or rot damage. Its best to remove any compromised tubers from your cluster before re-potting.

A repeat of the first image but once all my divisions are made I just labeled them as part of a Division group b/c I didn't have any labels before hand so division groups just mark which tubers came from the same plant. All Division: A pots were from the same plant. All the Division: B pots were from the same plant, etc. In the spring when I take these out to the allotment they will be planted in the ground in these labeled pots for their 2nd year evaluation.

I'll post updates with how my divisions go and on-going dahlia projects so I hope you found this one informative and useful!