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Welcome Tua Pek Kong, the Mitcheldean Garden 2018
Dazzling Dahlias

This page is part of a series of garden blogs from 2018. Click here for the index.


Everybody has important things in their domestic life. For some it's their children (or even grandchildren), for Yuehong it's her roses and for me it's my dahlias. They suit my lifestyle perfectly, every spring just after we return from Penang, I take them out of their hibernation boxes in the garage, throw out the few which have gone rotten and put the rest in plant tubs with Yuehong's second hand compost, water them and put them to one side to get started. Meanwhile, I wait for the tulips to complete their annual cycle and as soon as I decently can, I dig them up and pop them into the vegetable patch until they are ready to be put into storage.

At this point, many bags of horse manure are deep dug into the beds and covered with a layer of insulating compost and the now sprouting dahlias can be popped into their flowering positions. By a strange coincidence this usually coincides with the start of the steam rally season and I can more or less forget about them for the next couple of months. They don't need much water and unlike the roses they don't seem to suffer from greenfly and fungus although I do need to scatter slug bait around them once or twice in the early days.

This year our new friend Tua Pek Kong has delivered us the summer of a lifetime (I missed 1976 as I was in Penang) with almost continuous sunshine. Now after a much needed rainy week or two we are enjoying an Indian Summer. The early morning mist tells us that it is almost October and it's nearly 3 months since I did a proper garden blog. If this is climate change, give me more! Sorry, only joking... 

In the middle of the picture is one of my dahlia beds, this year they have almost 100% occupation. Next year, builders permitting, it may look even bigger and better as we intend to erect a wall to enclose it.

Moving down the garden, the flower bed at the side of the house was filled with dahlias from that most unlikely of sources, Lidl. The price was outrageously low and if I had one small criticism it would be that the packing didn't make it clear that half of them would be shorter than average. They are much, much better than the picture suggests.

My main dahlia bed has traditionally been down by the road as I nabbed it after the wall was built before Yuehong could get her hands on it, she expected it to be a basket case as she saw what went into it during construction. Suffice to say, she was half right and it was a lot of hard work to get it as it is now, a solid mass of colour from early August until late October. In return, I have ceased to plant dahlias in the beds in front of the house so she has extra room for annuals.

However, the most extraordinary story of the year has to be the fate of the runts, those tubers that were too slow or too weak and which might well have been discarded onto the compost heap had not a space been available in the vegetable patch. I have been ordered to do a proper repeat next year and I will make sure that those that are well endowed are better supported. As it is, they have provided a non stop supply for Yuehong's flower vases round the house. Just as well too as the roses that normally supply them were unable to cope with the summer drought.

This morning I went out and popped off the following pictures of the individual flowers, I've lost track of how many varieties we have, necessarily the early bloomers are absent and there are quite a few others which didn't have a tip top example available. The first single bloom from one of the vegetable patch near rejects is Yuehong's favourite, my hand gives some idea of the size. They are all roughly in the range of 4-6 inches across.

Not shown is the dahlia whose tuber actually ended up on the compost patch and has since grown healthily although it has yet to flower. Right now I am about to carefully label each and every one so they can be sorted when, in just 4 weeks, whatever their condition all will be dug up and the tubers prepared for winter hibernation before we go off to Penang. The beds will get their biannual manure dressing and the tulips will go in, for which we have some reinforcements from that other unlikely source, Aldi. While I am digging furiously, Yuehong will be dealing with the hyacinths and anemones.

Click here for the next part.


Rob and Yuehong Dickinson

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