I'm at Goddards in York. A lovely Arts and Crafts garden created by the Terry family
of Terry's chocolate fame. The garden has herbaceous borders, terraces,
a small kitchen garden, a glasshouse and much much more.
And here Tom Longridge grows lots of dahlias which flower right through the summer.
Today he's going to show us how he keeps them going year after year.
Hi Becky. It's nice to find you here in your borders. I love these borders here at Goddards.
And you've obviously got a lot of dahlias haven't you? We do. When did these get planted out?
These got planted out at the end of May when all the sort of danger of frost has gone.
And they've been flowering in the borders ever since. They're really prolific generous flowers aren't they?
So I know they're here for display and you probably don't cut them but they do make excellent cut flowers don't they?
They do. Just because they keep on flowering, so they'll just give you a prolific number of flowers
across the season. So yeah, they're great for cut flowers.
Okay well let's see how you lift them. So I'm just going to cut back some of this top growth here
so I can see where the tubers are, and the main thing is I don't want to damage the tubers.
So I'm going to just ease the spade in quite gently at a decent distance from the base of the plant,
and what I'm going to do is just knock off some of the soil.
And again just being careful to tease off some of the soil which we don't need. Oh there they are.
There's the tubers, there we go. It's ready to go down to the greenhouse. Okay let's go there.
Okay so we brought them into the potting shed, what's the starting point?
The starting point is to get rid of a little bit more of this damp soil so just teasing a bit more out,
being careful not to damage the tubers. So the next thing I would do
is cut these stems down a little bit. Okay. They don't need to be quite so long.
So take them down to about 10, 15 centimetres.
First stage is to really dry this tuber out, and because these stems are hollow
and they tend to hold the water, the moisture. We'll dry them out upside down so any of the water can run out.
And we'd normally leave those for a good couple of weeks to really dry out thoroughly
before we pack them away for the winter. Little handy crate and just sort of balance
them on the edge like that which is fine and you can put another one on this side. And then you want
to store them in a dry place. A greenhouse is ideal, or somewhere where it's going to be frost-free
and dry for a couple of weeks to come. Okay, great. So that's the next stage
but can I see how you would then pack them up for the winter once they were dry? Yeah sure.
So what I normally do is this is an old mushroom crate. Just line it with some newspaper.
Just like that. And at this stage it can just go in like so.
And I have a heated greenhouse here so I have the right conditions.
Nice and dry, frost-free and all I need to do is put over some more newspaper over the top.
Just tuck that in,
and that's it. I store it under the benches in the greenhouse,
and check them once in a while to make sure they're okay, and they're fine till February.
Okay. So that looks like a really nice simple way of doing it if you've got the right growing conditions,
but if you're a little bit worried that the place you're storing them in might be a tiny bit damp
and you want to sort of protect them even more there's another way isn't there?
Absolutely yes, and I'm happy to show you how to do that. Yeah that would be great, thanks.
So what we're going to need for this is some compost. So I've got my peat-free compost here
and just a pot that's going to be big enough to get the tubers in. And you do
sometimes need fairly big pots. And put a bit of compost in the bottom and this compost is reasonably dry.
Yeah that's important isn't it? Yes, you don't want it to be sitting in wet compost.
So. There you go.
So just put the tuber into the pot and then pack the compost around it.
So it's really just like as if you were planting it in a pot isn't it. The fact that you're using really dry compost
and you're not going to water it? that's right. There you go.
You've still got to put this somewhere nice and dry and frost-free for the winter months.
So anywhere like a dry greenhouse or a dry shed would do.
Well that's great. Thank you very much for showing me all those techniques. No problem.
National Trust gardens can be great sources of inspiration,
and our gardeners and volunteers are always happy to talk. So why not come and visit
one of our places or get the National Trust School of Gardening from our shop.