Dahlia Experiments 2025 - Source Books For Dahlia Growing and Hybridising
Hello friends,
As you've probably already figured it out by now, I love doing gardening experiments. Whether it be growing my own wheat, and then harvesting that flour to bake into my own bread, or growing my own linen plants so I can spin and then weave the fibre from it, I'm curious about how the world works, and especially how plants work. This mostly comes from the fact that I'm a trained scientist, I have a PhD in Plant Biochemistry, and also a certificate in Horticulture. From a very young age, while gardening with my grandfather and aunt in their backyard, I fell in love with plants, and I decided I wanted to work with them.
Even though I am no longer in these fields of work, I still love learning about plants, and I use my garden as an experimental testing ground to do this on a very small scale. This, combined with my obsession and love of dahlias, I've decided that this growing season is going to be the one where I hone my dahlia skills including growing hybridised seeds from scratch, taking my own cuttings, and also breeding new dahlias from dahlias I already have growing in my garden.
To do this my first job has been to find good source material to work from. Even though there is a tonne of information about dahlia growing and hybridising on the internet, it's hard to know what information is accurate, and what information is incorrect. Luckily there are some very good source books available from growers and hybridisers I trust, and I now have three books from them at my disposal.
First up is Erin Benzakein from Floret Flower Farm, her work with dahlias and other plants like zinnias is legendary, and her book "Discovering Dahlias" has been my go to dahlia book for years. It includes understanding dahlia types, how to grow, store, and divide dahlias, and also advanced techniques including propagating and hybridising dahlias. Her book also includes a great section on floral designing with dahlias, along with a visual section of her favorite dahlias sorted by colour. I really recommend this book to any new dahlia grower.
The last two dahlia source books I now own are by Kristine Albrecht, the owner of Santa Cruiz Dahlias. Her long term work on dahlia breeding, and her deep dive into dahlia genetics (which she is willing to share), makes her a fountain of knowledge about dahlias. Her book "Dahlias: Seed to Bloom" is an in depth guide to dahlia growing from seed to bloom. This is a great companion book to "Discovering Dahlias", and I now use them both side by side.
Kristine Albrecht's second book "Dahlia Breeding for the Farmer-Florist and the Home Gardener", is a small, but dense step by step guide to hybridising new dahlia varieties by seed. Its sections on dahlia genetics, traits to target in dahlia breeding, and growing dahlia seedlings, is perfect for the dahlia enthusiast interested in dahlia breeding. It was also really great to see her record keeping set up as well, as detailed notes are needed to decide whether a dahlia seedling has the traits you are looking for in the first year, and in the continuing years, if you decide to keep growing it.
With spring now sprinting towards summer with each passing day, and the first of my garden dahlias are popping their leaves above ground, I can't wait to dive into all things dahlias this growing season.
Have a wonderful day
Julie-Ann
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Harvesting and Processing Tea From My Camellia Sinensis Plant
Hello friends,
I drink a lot of tea, and especially flavored black, green, and white tea, usually for breakfast and alongside a piece of toast. And of course since tea comes from the plant Camellia sinensis, growing my own tea plant, and then harvesting tea leaves from it, has been high on my list of things to do over the years.
Camellia sinensis, aka the tea plant, is in the camellia family, so if you can grow camellias in your garden, you can grow a tea plant of your very own. Camellia sinensis
thrives in conditions with part shade, and needs to be protected from strong winds, in acidic, well-drained, and organically rich soil. Consistent moisture is needed for the tea plant to be happy, especially during dry spells and leaf production, but it also doesn't like waterlogged conditions either. Here in Mosgiel where we live, our winter temperatures drop down to -6˚C, and in summer they rise up to 35˚C, and my tea plant happily survives both of these extremes without needing any frost cloth or extra watering.
The first challenge in growing my own tea plant was getting hold of a Camellia sinensis plant of my very own. The easiest time of the year to track down tea plants is in the spring, but when I hunted for one in autumn, I was able to find one for sale online. Once it arrived by courier, I planted it in a spot on the south side of the house, where it gets periods of both sun and shade during the day, and it lives beside my blueberry bushes which also like acidic conditions.
Ever since I bought my tea plant, I've been patiently waiting for it to be big enough to harvest the leaves for processing. Tea leaves are harvested by plucking off new buds and the first two leaves from the tip of the plant in spring for the highest quality tea. After doing some research on how to process tea at home, I decided to wait and see how big of a harvest I got before making a decision about which tea type to process. Well, it ended up being a very small harvest, a total of 8 grams of tea leaves this year, so I opted to go for the simplest tea processing method, which was making white tea.
The process of making white tea involves only two steps, and they are both very easy to do at home. The first step was to pluck the tea leaf tips off the plant and then lay them out to dry for 48 hours, in a stage they call withering. During withering, tea leaves begin breaking down, and the biochemical processes inside them leads to a tea which is fruity and floral and sweet, with reduced astringency and a sweet aroma profile.
I harvested tea leaves in the morning, as was suggested in my research, and then laid them out to wither on a tray in the sun for 48 hours. As it's been quite windy this spring, I couldn't lay them outside, as they would very easily blow away, so I set them up inside our glasshouse for two days.
At the end of this step, it was time to dry the tea and stop the break down process. For white tea, you dry the withered tea leaves at 180˚F/82˚C for 15 - 20 minutes, or until the leaves are crispy. For this step I decided to use our dehydrator on its highest setting, which ended up taking 1 hour of drying time at 80˚C.
When the tea leaves were dry and crispy I removed the leaves from the stalks and then popped them in our coffee/herb grinder for about 10 seconds to break the leaves up smaller. The resulting leaves were only big enough to make two cups of tea.
All that remained was to brew my own cup of tea, so I placed 1 teaspoon of white tea leaves into a strainer and added it to a tea cup. I heated water to around 85˚C, and then added it to the cup and let the tea steep for 1 minute.
The resulting tea was just wonderful, despite some of the tea leaves escaping the strainer while steeping. The white tea flavor was light, sweet, delicate, and had a slight floral taste, along with a pleasant grassy scent. It was very drinkable and much nicer than white teas that I've bought commercially.
Now knowing how easy it is to make my own white tea, I'm very much looking forward to harvesting and brewing my own tea each spring. Hopefully as my tea plant continues to grow bigger, I'll get bigger harvests so that I can try brewing other types of tea.
Have a wonderful day
Julie-Ann
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I've Gone Completely Dahlia Crazy
Hello friends,
If you were to ask me about my top 5 favorite flowers of all time, the list would be something like this: Roses, Lavender, Dahlias, Daffodils, and Cosmos.
But over the last couple of years dahlias have crept up to the top that list, as each of the gardening projects around our home ended up giving me more and more space to grow dahlias. It also didn't help that I started following a bunch of dahlia growers on social media, and also especially, Floret Flower Farm in the USA, on both Instagram and YouTube. I became especially fond of anemone dahlias, collarette dahlias, and single dahlia varieties, of course in a large number of colours and sizes.
It got to a point that I had developed a wish list of some very cool, but rare dahlias I just had to have...and come dahlia bulb pre-sale time this winter I went a little nuts buying them.
The next problem was figuring out where to put them, so out came my trusty Instax photo printer, and I got to work printing out photos of all the dahlia varieties I had, and also the ones on their way to me, and then I got to work organizing them. First up was developing a dahlia database based on type and colour and size.
The colour coding in the database give me a quick idea of where my dahlias are in terms of where they are in the world. Sage green are dahlias already in place. Bright green are dahlias which have to be moved. Apricot means that the dahlia is in storage in the garage. Peach means that the dahlia has not arrived yet.
Next up was to break down our garden into sections, and then arrange the dahlia photos in each area of the garden to get an overall plan. I'm going to use the following abbreviations for the different dahlia types: Anemone (A), Collarette (C), Decorative (D), Dinner Plate (DP), and Single (S), Waterlily (W).
Front Garden Right: Peaches and Cream (D), Penhill Dark Monarch (DP), Totally Tangerine (A). I grouped these based on similar colouring.
Front Garden Middle: Iced Tea (D), Keith Hammett Dream Seeker (C), Joal Kaitlyn (D), and Sweet Nathalie (D). These all have similarish apricot colouring.
Front Driveway Road: Yelno Harmony (W), Cafe Au Lait (DP). These have light apricot colouring.
Front Driveway Middle: Lucky Number (D), Aporo Road Strawberry (D), Molly Raven (D), Cafe Au Lait Twist (DP). All these have dark pink shades, and should look amazing together.
Patio: Zahra (A), Floorinoor (A), Misses Amy (A). Three anemone dahlias I bought very recently, so they go into pots this year because I have no more space in the garden.
Back Driveway: Silver Years (D), Strawberry and Cream (D), Dutch Pearl (D), Muchacha (D). A gradient from light pink to dark pink.
Back Garden Back Fence: Rosemary Webb (W), Islander (DP), Bonesta (D), Bumble Rumble (C), Cafe Au Lait Royal (DP), Sweet Sanne (D), Cafe Au Lait Rose (DP), Arthur Hammerly (DP), Mambo (A), Misses Miley (D), Impression Famoso (C), Fenna Baij (A), Julie-Ann (S, a dahlia I hybridised last year), Keith Hammett Mystic Sparkler (S). A gradient of colour from left to right along the back fence. It's a bit more loose in terms of shading toward the right side, with dahlias I didn't know where to put elsewhere.
Back Garden Far Right Corner: Keith Hammett Butterscotch (C), The Phantom (A), Dark Tiger (C). Collarette and anemone dahlias that are small and fit under the small tree in that space.
Back Garden Right Fence Back: Keith Hammett Protegee (S), Keith Hammett Delicacy (C), Pink Magic (D), Keith Hammett Tranquility (C), Lady Liberty (D), and Polka (A). Shades of pink and white.
Back Garden Right Fence Front: Great Silence (D), Fancy Pants (C), Salmon River (D), and Fairway Pilot (DP). More peachy tones.
As you can see I now have 48 dahlias in my garden (which don't include the seedling dahlias I'm growing in pots right now). In this second spreadsheet I've organised the dahlias based on where they are in the garden, and which direction they are in. It's a good idea for when labels come off the dahlias, and I can't figure out which ones they are after they die back in winter...
With this large amount of dahlias in my garden, I now have no space for any more dahlias (or any other plants really), even though I do have some more dahlias on my wish list like Rhubarb and Cream, Appleblossom, Thomas Edison, Marshmallow Baby, Negroni Sunset, Klara Zak, Dutch Delight, Breakout, Purple Flame, and Labyrinth.
Either I need to dig up what little grass space we have left, or I would need to get rid of our long, side hedge, and then build a new fence between us and the neighbours, and then make another garden...
For now I'll just have to pit the dahlias up against each other Hunger Games style, and see which plants survive each year.
Have a wonderful day
Julie-Ann
PS - After this post was written I got word from NZ Bulbs that one of the dahlias that hadn't arrived yet, Dark Tiger, was unavailable, so I had to choose another dahlia to replace it with. I chose the waterlily dahlia "Twiggy", but then had to rearrange a couple of dahlias in that area of the garden to fit this change, as Twiggy grows much bigger in size than the space I had chosen Dark Tiger for...
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King Seeds And Egmont Seeds Seed Haul
Hello friends,
Over the course of this winter I bought seeds from both Kings Seeds and Egmont Seeds, for growing vegetables, herbs, and flowers in the garden this growing season.
First up are the seeds from Kings Seeds, where I bought carrot, spinach, onion, and rocket vegetable seeds for the vegetable garden this spring. I also got a bunch of herb seed varieties including, parsley, feverfew, chamomile, catnip, catgrass, calendula, and basil seeds. I also bought a few flower seeds including zinnia, cosmos, yarrow, and dwarf lupin.
From Egmont Seeds I bought a pile of seeds including cucumber, capsicum, chickpea, stevia, thyme, and lavender, along with a bunch of new pansy varieties after I fell victim to the pansy mania hitting the world at present. Egmont seeds have a great range of pansy seeds available, with lots of varieties with frills and pretty colours that I haven't seen before.
I can't wait to see the plants that grow from all these seeds in the coming spring and summer, and then the harvests and flowers I will get from them...
Have a wonderful day
Julie-Ann
Want to discuss my post? Feel free to chat with me on Instagram or Mastodon or Bluesky.
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