Dahlia Cuttings and Seedlings: How We Multiply and Hybridize Dahlias
Long before our dahlia fields are overflowing with blooms, a quieter kind of magic is happening behind the scenes inside our barn and hoop house. Spring on the farm means trays of cuttings, seedlings under grow lights, and lots of experimenting with propagation and hybridizing.
Recently, I asked Mary to share more about two of her favorite jobs on the farm: taking dahlia cuttings and growing brand new dahlias from seed.
How We Take Dahlia Cuttings
Taking dahlia cuttings is one of the main ways we multiply our favorite varieties on the farm. The process starts by waking up tubers early in the season, sometimes as early as January, using warmth, moisture, grow lights, and heating pads.
Once sprouts emerge from the eyes on the tuber, Mary gently removes them to create cuttings. What’s amazing is that the original tuber keeps producing more sprouts, allowing us to take several cuttings from one tuber before eventually planting that tuber in the field too.
After rooting, the cuttings are grown much like flower seedlings. Sometimes we plant them directly into the field, but often we up-pot them first and allow them to grow larger before planting outdoors.
One of the coolest parts of the process happens underground. When lower leaf sets are removed and buried beneath the soil, those hidden nodes can eventually become tubers. In the fall, you can actually see tubers forming along the buried stem where those leaves once were.
For home gardeners, dahlia cuttings are an incredible way to expand your collection. If you only have one tuber of a variety you love, taking cuttings can allow you to grow multiple plants from that single tuber.
Growing Brand New Dahlias from Seed
As much as Mary loves propagation, her other favorite farm project might be hybridizing brand new dahlias from seed.
Unlike tubers, which produce exact genetic clones of the original plant, dahlia seeds create completely unique flowers. Every seed has the potential to become something never seen before.
At the end of the season, we allow some flowers to mature into seed pods instead of harvesting them. Bees naturally pollinate the flowers throughout the field, creating all kinds of unexpected genetic combinations between nearby dahlias.
Each year, Mary collects those seed pods and plants the seeds the following season just to see what appears. Some seedlings are ordinary, some are unusual, and every once in a while one feels truly special.
We already have a few seedlings we’re continuing to grow and evaluate, and maybe someday one of them will become an official EarthSpoke Farms cultivar.
Last season, Mary also experimented with hand pollination for the first time, intentionally crossing specific dahlias together instead of relying only on bees. She harvested a small number of seeds from those crosses, and this season we’ll finally get to see what grows from them.
Honestly, that may be the most exciting part of all: somewhere in those trays of seedlings could be an AMAZING flower that nobody has ever seen before.