THOUGHTS WHILE BENDING

June 20th 2005

I was over the road tying up the splits, bend double, and cutting off my air supply doing the first tie, when it dawned on me.  Why was I working so hard, it certainly wasn't for profit, I could knock out a couple of rooms decorating, and earn far more than I ever could growing dahlias. No it was the pleasure it gave me to produce something special. I looked around at my little plot and realised I was the only one in the World with these varieties,  I lie, Jack Gott has a few that he's assessing for me, but apart for that, this was somewhere special. Do you know why there aren't thousands of dahlia breeders? Because they won't put the hours in. I carried on this worse job of all, that first tie, funny thing was it never bothered me so much as now. I'd had a butchers at the seedling bed, and wheedled out about half a dozen seedlings, the labels all had a `Y' on them. My short hand for Yvonne, Charlie Dimmock's dad., in dahlia terms of course. I'd decided to scrap my stock of Yvonne this year. Whether she's picked up a virus from neighbouring dahlias, via flying insects, or whether it was concealed in the variety when I bought it four years ago I'll never know, but I knew I couldn't keep it now. Especially when I asked Harry Lawson if virus could be transported via pollen, and he told me it most certainly could.  Here was the evident lying on the grass, right before my eyes, all pulled up from the seedling bed. The worst of the bunch was a plant who's leaves seemed to be bunched around the stem, with know more gap between nodes than a quarter of an inch, the top ended up with a rosette of leaves resembling a green flower. Others had either of very pale leaf colour, or were struggling to keep up with their stronger cousins. My trouble has always been not to ditch weak and obviously unsuitable seedlings at the onset, too dam soft that's my trouble, but if I'm to protect the rest of each season crop, I must cull the weak ones, after all they're not people. Mind you this doesn't mean the seedlings that are slow to germinate, some of these produce the finest flowers.

The Carrion Crows that have moved into the very large Elm tree adjacent to the seedling plot this year, have stopped pulling out the labels from this years crop of seedlings thank God, here's me taking all the trouble of labelling every thing in sight, and their curiosity drives them to continually remove them, luckily most were only dumped beside the plant they were marking. Thank goodness they hadn't touched the trays of dahlias I'm growing for pot tubers, because that would have been disastrous. As it is I am letting all these flower on the break bud, to confirm they are, as written on the label. Most are for a venture I'm trying to get off the ground called the `Moon Series' if it's successful they may grace John Woolman's catalogue next year, here I go dreaming again. Anyway here are some of them.

Naturally they don't look the same as they did last year growing with no root restriction, but most can be matched to their passport photograph, and flower shape alone does the trick. The thing that I was amazed about was, although they are growing in three and a half inch square pots, quite a few have fantastic form.
 

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