Dan's Garden: Dahlias and Zinnias
Published: Oct. 4, 2019 at 8:45 PM CDT
Looking around the area, you don’t see a lot of flowers still in bloom. Dan Cashman found a backyard where the flowers are still showing their summer colors.
Aren’t these Dahlias beautiful? And it’s early October. I’m in the backyard of Hal and Geri Hase's house in Bismarck. We thought we were going to shoot this five weeks ago for the garden show, but everything is so late this year that here we are in October, and their still in blooming and they have been for a little while.
They are what I call perennials, but you have to dig them up before it goes down to 20 degrees at night. They need a little frost before you dig them. Then Geri stores them in a burlap bags with moist peat moss in a root cellar where it’s 40 degrees or cooler. You plant them in the spring and their color is amazing.
They come in shorter varieties and two tones. I love the red, the yellow ones are beautiful. The white ones, their just amazing but they, you know, have to be dug in the fall and stored.
Now I’m standing in front of their Zinnia plants, which they plant every year from seed. And like the Dahlias, they like a rich soil and like to be fertilized a few times during the summer to make them bloom.
These have been blooming all summer long; these are no work at all. You just collect the seeds and plant them in the spring. So if you want a lot of color next year think about Dahlias. think about Zinnias.
And until next time, good gardening.
