Table of Contents
Receiving your Dahlia Tubers
Dahlia tubers are like people: they come in a wide range of sizes, from small, narrow, slightly wrinkled ones, to big, round, plump ones.
It can be a shock for new Dahlia growers to compare two varieties: the smaller one looks like a reject compared to the bigger one!
This diversity is natural, and in many cases, a variety with the smaller tubers grows into a bigger plant with bigger flowers than a variety with large tubers.
My Dahlia Tuber is Wrinkled and Shrivelled Looking!
A wrinkled, shrivelled looking dahlia tuber is natural and normal for many varieties, and perfectly good to plant if it is firm.
My Dahlia Tuber is Soft!
If the tuber is soft, even if it’s not shrivelled, then it’s almost certainly rotten, diseased, or too old to grow well, and should be discarded.
If you receive soft tubers from us, please Contact Us for a replacement.
Dahlia Tuber Anatomy
A dahlia tuber consists of three main parts, colour-coded for you:
(Images courtesy of Summer Dreams Farm in Michigan, USA, from their excellent Dahlia Tuber Splitting Guide)
From top to bottom:
- Pink: The crown (or head) at the top, which has “eyes“, where all the shoots will come from. These little bumps can be a bit hard to see until they start swelling prior to sprouting.
- Purple: The neck, connecting the head to the tuber body.
- Green: The tuber body, which only stores starch and does not produce any leafy shoots, only roots. Most Dahlias have several bodies per crown, so losing one doesn’t matter.
Therefore:
- A tuber with no eyes is useless and can be thrown away, no matter how big it is. It will still grow roots until it dies, but it will never shoot.
- A crown/head with an eye and a small scrap of tuber body still attached, even just the neck, will grow.
In year one, it will be a smallish plant, but in year two it will look normal. - If the eyes have begun to sprout before delivery and their shoots get knocked off, this is not a problem: the eye will make more shoots.
What Dahlia Eyes Look Like
Eyes are the most important part of the dahlia: they are the buds that produce all the leaves and flowers.
The eye will only be on the crown end, on top of the neck, never anywhere else on the tuber body. Dahlias are not like potato tubers in that sense, which can have eyes anywhere on the tuber body.
They become obvious when they begin to swell and break, but on a dormant tuber they are still quite easy to spot, rather like a wart:
This is an eye sprouting, with the black line marking the point where the neck ends, and the crown begins; if you were to cut the tuber there, the eye would still grow, but slowly.
What happens if a shoot snaps off a tuber?
Don’t worry! Here is what happens when a shoot is broken off; you can see the round scar in the centre of the image. The eye grows a new shoot right away.
(Photo used with permission from Clara Joyce Flowers.)
What do I do if I receive my Dahlias with some Tuber Bodies broken off?
Below, you can see the crown meets the necks of the tubers. If you were to cut off all the necks and tubers, the remaining crown would still grow shoots, and recover with new tubers for the following year.
This means that if your Dahlia got a knock in transit and has a tuber or two hanging by thread if not clean off, you always plant the crown with its remaining tubers as normal. You won’t see a noticeable difference in size or flowering in the first year.
Inspect a broken off tuber for a piece of crown on top with an eye: most tubers break off without one, but not all.
- If you find an eye on the tuber, that’s great – you have two plants!
- If there is no eye on the tuber, throw it away. It hardly matters to the Dahlia: it’s the equivalent of snipping off a piece of root from a tree or shrub.
You probably won’t even notice the very slight reduction in the Dahlia’s size during its first year, and in the second year it will have replaced the lost tuber with a fistful of new ones.