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Welcome to the cut flower product class.
Hello, today I've got a very special guest with me today.
I've got Tom from Womans and Tom will introduce himself in a moment.
The Womans are specialists in day years and presents, amongst other things.
Today we're going to be talking about day years.
So Tom, no further ado, would you like to introduce yourself?
Sure, yeah.
My name's Tom Stimson.
I've been in the horticultural industry really from a work point of view ever since
I left school.
My first, I suppose my interest in gardening stems right back from when I was a very young
child through my parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles.
I suppose one uncle in particular, my great uncle Vic, used to be a head gardener for
an estate in Leicestershire and used to work in a wonderful old wall garden where he used
to grow so many dahlias and especially dahlias, but also amongst other things.
And I just remember there being rows and rows of these wonderful flowers, all colours,
all shapes and sizes, all flower types.
And I think from that sort of early age that got me pretty much hooked on dahlias and I've
loved them throughout my working and adult life really.
So I studied for a Bachelor of Science degree at Rital College in Essex.
And for a time I worked for a garden centre chain.
I dabbled sort of in the cut flower industry a little bit for a company on the south coast.
And then I ended up working for Walmans and I've been there now for over 20 years.
So it's quite a long time.
So now I might sort of tightly head a fortune culture.
I head up our buying team and I'm responsible for the range planning for our catalogue and
the content on our website.
And along with my colleagues, we work to display as many different varieties of Bayley as we
can.
It's her moving feast.
It's forever ongoing.
So yes, that's sort of my sort of immediate background I suppose.
There definitely is a trend towards dahlias now.
I think it probably historically was great and then took a dip and now it's on the rise
again.
I've seen as growers and the demand and everything is very daily focussed, which is brilliant.
Have you seen the same trend?
Yes, for definite because when we've been trialing dahlias for years and we have about
a hectare of trial garden at our office in Suffolk.
And I suppose we tried about 100 varieties every year.
And yes, when to start with, from a sales point of view numbers, we're really quite
low.
But I think as people of, I mean, we work quite hard to gain really excellent imagery.
We focussed on varieties that are good and easy to grow.
And we've definitely seen a rise up the last five years and especially through the lockdown
sort of years as well with more people gardening, dramatic rise.
And I think it's their colour.
They're so vibrant, full of colour.
I think people are starting to fall in love with them again.
Definitely.
I spoke to Bec's Partridge this week who's written a book called Everlastings and she
talked about even drying dahlias, which is very interesting to get you through the winter.
You know, obviously as a flower grower, it's lovely to have something in the winter as
well.
And I've never thought about drying dahlias, but that's quite an interesting new sort of
proposition really.
I suppose actually, yeah, when you, if you think about it, I suppose if you could get
them before they get too mushy, cutting them, hanging them upside down as you would alleys,
I suppose really, just letting them all to drain out, then yes, I can see that from a,
you get that lovely crisp sort of display a bit like hydrangeas, wouldn't it, that have
dried.
Yeah, I could see, especially the different flower types.
You've got balls, deckeratives, water lilies, all those different flower shapes together.
It could look really wonderful.
Yeah, absolutely.
So that was another use, I thought, dahlias all year round, what could be better?
Absolutely, it would be wonderful.
So I've just got some questions that are, are fire off if that's okay, Tom?
Sure.
So when do we plant our dahlias?
Well, I always, my personal thing is I always like to pop them.
So I tend to plant mine sort of early April, and I start to, whether I'm buying new ones
or whether I've kept them from over winter, whether I've lifted, but that tends to be
late March, early April, I tend to put them in a three litre pot and let them grow and
start to shoot.
And I do give them protection at that point.
So I found generally, I just keep mine in a my cold greenhouse.
And if I, if we get an unexpected bout of coldness, I will just cover them over with
fleece, but generally I found them to be fine.
So then I, I let them develop, get the pots to be quite full of root, nice, strong and
sturdy shoots before I plant out, generally middle to end of May.
That's my sort of time for doing it.
Yeah, because, you know, it's almost like you're playing with the weather, aren't you?
When's the last frost?
You know, and some people say, oh, it's the 21st of April and we've had frost in May.
So I can see why you do that.
So they're wrapping them off.
Yeah, absolutely.
But if you, if you haven't got space to, to pot up, then I think mid May is a good time
to plant outside.
And very often on our trials ground, we have done that in the past, where we've just planted
direct into the ground around the middle of May.
So they soon quickly start to show us amazing.
I love them.
So when, as a flower grower, I definitely love them.
So what should you take into account when you're planting your, your tuber, your daily
a tuber?
What do you need to think about?
Well, I think overall site is in, is important.
Lots of sun.
Daily is don't like to be in the shade.
Nice full sun position.
And if you've got ideally just a little bit of shelter, so if you've got planting up near
a screened hedge or a lowish fence or if you can't provide that shelter, they might just
need a little bit of support, especially for some of the taller bar artists.
Daily is love feed.
So and loads of it, lots of feed and lots of water, but they don't like to be water
locked.
So it's a bit of almost an oxymorpic percent.
They want loads of water and feed, but they don't like to be sitting in it.
So good free draining soil, but pretty humorous rich.
And I mean, our site on our trials ground tends to be quite free draining.
We can have a huge downpour, but it does dry out quite free conveage.
So we incorporate lots of muck, literally good old fashioned organic manure.
We turn the soil over really well.
Two spade steps.
It's the best.
I don't think you could beat it really.
And then yeah, just lots of water and feed really throughout.
I tend to feed with a high nitrogen feed up until we get into June.
And then I start to switch to a high potash feed as we get towards the end of June, beginning
of July to encourage all the flowering shoots.
Yeah, I probably don't feed mine enough.
Actually now you've just mentioned that.
So that'll be my challenge.
Yeah, absolutely loads.
Yeah.
I mean, we're in it.
We use support because we're in a very sunny position as well drained and all the rest
of it.
And we use manure, but so we're using support.
We do support outs.
But yeah, it depends on the variety of course, but yeah, more feeding is what I've learned
today, definitely more feeding.
Yeah, they're really hungry.
And I know I don't know how many varieties there are of day years.
I think I read something ridiculous.
It's just 40,000 or something really unique.
It is tens of thousands here.
Yeah, I think I read 47,000 somewhere.
So it's very impossible to think with the best ones for cutting.
But what are your personal favorites or your top five or?
I know it depends.
You know, if you're a wedding florist, you'd be growing very sort of, you'd be growing
lots of the whites and lots of pinks.
But you know, we bishops, we grow lots of bishops and very bright colors.
So what would be your top five and why?
Well, I see a pep from God.
I think that's almost impossible to name top five.
But I think I do have different and favorite colors.
And I do love sort of plums and pearls, oranges.
I mean, I do love varieties like Profundo, which is a lovely rich plum color.
And it's wonderful for cutting.
It's a ball type.
And I think I do have a bit of a tendency to go for the ball types and the smaller
of deckatives just because they last so well in the bars far.
Yeah, definitely more so than the larger deckatives.
So for me, for plums and purple colors, I love Profundo.
I love a variety called Balesca, which is really gorgeous.
It's, I mean, it does have bits of yellow in, but it's that gorgeous, crinsany plum color.
It's just found, I love it.
And there's another gorgeous variety called Zaconia, which I really love as well.
And some of those varieties, we created a collection last year,
I didn't even have been here before, actually.
We do so many of them that I sometimes forget which year we've introduced them.
But we called it the Black Purrent Disease Collection,
literally because it's full of those gorgeous, rich sort of plum purple tones.
So I do love those colors for definite and I love the oranges.
And I think my favorite orange would be David Howard by a long shot.
And I love it because I love his height.
I love it because it's quite sturdy.
So I never stank mine at all.
They seem to cope quite well without any form of staking.
And they've so many flowers.
I mean, you can cut bunches and bunches off them.
And of course, the more you cut, like all daily is, the more you get.
I think that's the one most important thing for daily is this the cutting of them.
Yeah.
Then literally it is the more you cut, the more you get.
And David Howard is wonderful for that.
It has lovely tall stems.
The flowers are a bit bigger than a ball.
It's a smallish to medium decorative.
But the orange is such an intense color.
The stems are dark and the foliage is bronze.
It's wonderful in a vase, especially if you've got like a blue vase
or a rich sort of navy colored bars plump them in there.
They're just fabulous.
And I suppose I also love daily is in parts.
And of course, the taller varieties can be a bit problematic for their.
You do be quite a bit of support, but there is a variety called totally tendery,
which is an ananone flower.
And I really love that.
The orange is so intense and the petals sort of reflects back as the flowers mature.
And that is wonderful in a pot.
So I have five or six of those dotted around my sort of that sort of door steps.
And they're really wonderful.
So I suppose they're just a few of my favorites.
I could go on for a bit.
I know.
It's the type is now obviously we're growing.
We grow the open ones for pollination.
So we get lots of bees.
So that's great.
The single flower ones.
Yeah. So the ball ones we love actually if we're going to use this cut flowers
because they're better.
And like you say, they've got really good vase life and they're quite sturdy.
So yeah, we grow probably about 10 varieties.
So maybe even more 15 varieties, but we cover the whole color spectrum
right away from burgundy oranges to yellows to whites to pinks.
And that's kind of what we're purchasing.
But yeah.
No, I love what and you mentioned the single flowers.
And that is one area that yeah, we do.
I mean, the Bishop series is still very popular.
I sometimes think the Bishop series is not a very uniform series in terms of height.
You've got a lot of variation there.
But of course, yes, Bishop of Landaf is what is wonderful, isn't it?
And I still think it's one of the best reds.
But I do quite like the happy series of dahlias.
And they are more uniform in height.
And varieties like Happy Single Party, Happy Single Kiss,
Happy Single Flame, those three are wonderful.
They're lovely colors.
And yeah, the bees love them.
You can hear the bees buzzing around them all the time.
Yeah, which is great.
And the sales for those are definitely more popular than they ever used to be.
Yeah, I think so.
I think there's a lot of Dave Goldstone talking about bees and a lot more about environment.
And I think people have sort of got onto that.
And then they buy some Propollination as well.
So it's a mix.
It's a real mix.
So the age-old question to lift or not to lift your dahlias at the end of the season.
Yeah, I won't tell you what we do.
But yeah, what lift or not to lift?
Well, for me, I think it is quite simple, really.
I think if your soil is free draining, and it really does have to be free draining,
and I would say you're sort of maybe the Midlands down.
Yeah, that's us.
And where they are planted is quite sheltered.
And you are able to mulch quite freely.
Then I tend to leave them in.
So I leave mine in the ground.
I say at home, I do that.
On our trials site, we do lift them because that's a little bit, although the soil is
free draining, and that's just outside new market.
But the site tends to be a bit more exposed.
So we do lift them on there.
I think more than anything from a practical point of view because we need to keep the
site free of weeds.
We generally have a farmer come in and plow up our trials ground each year to keep it fresh
and incorporate.
Lots of organic manure.
I would say if definitely if your soil tends to be a bit on the heavy side, I would always
lift them, for sure.
And just let them dry out totally, turn them upside down, let all the water drain out,
and then literally put them in a tray, cover them over with some very dry compost sand or
sawdust, and then just keep them in the dark, somewhere frost-free, until the weather picks
up again, sort of March time, you can start and bring them to life again.
Just soak them and then pop them up or plant them out a little bit later.
So I think it really is where you live.
I think you just have to be sensible.
Yeah.
I mean, we've never lifted ours.
We did lift a few this year because we wanted to propagate from them.
Yeah.
But that was the only reason.
So we'd gone along with bamboo shoots, bamboo sticks and put, yeah, we quite like that one.
We'd like that one propagated, and we quite like that one.
We'll have that propagated.
But generally not, we would definitely mulch.
We definitely cover them up.
We put them to bed.
We'd make them nice and toasty.
And we leave them because actually the threat of lifting them and mice and looking after
them and freezing and all of that over the winter was almost too much, really.
But I think you're right.
If you live in the depths of Scotland and you're going to get lots of snow and the temperatures
are going to plummet and you're going to get lots of water and waterlogged, then you probably
want to lift them.
I think so, to be on the same side.
Yeah.
Well, that, yeah, that's what I would, I would always recommend.
So on that last point about propagating, how do you propagate from failures?
For me, the best thing I find is always cuttings.
And you can, and as they start, I always do this quite early on.
So this is the first shoot start to come up from the cheavers.
So I'm talking about ones that I've potted.
Yeah.
So once we get into April, early May, I will take from those shoots because they're strong,
they're healthy.
So I think that's a very good time.
And it also gives you enough time to get a decent plant that will flower that summer.
So yeah, I always think, and I think you get better results from cuttings as well.
It's always my preferred, preferred option.
Ours too, actually, is to take from cuttings.
So if people want to learn more about dailias, I know you've got lots of information on your
website, Tom.
And also if they want to come and have a browse and see what you've got, where do they find
you?
So the best, the best places on our website, that's where the biggest choice is, and that's
where the most information is.
So that's on www.warmans.com.
And I've now dealt that all the information is on there, all the varieties are on there.
There's also multiple images, very often variety, where we don't have space in all of our catalogs
to put all of those imagery and as much information.
But if you want a catalog as well, you can phone our order line as well, which is on
08 or 5, 658, 9137, and you can request a catalog as well.
And we have numerous catalogs.
We launched a daily catalog this year called Dazzling Dailias.
That's the new thing for us.
It's got a vibrant front cover.
So that's where we look as well.
I think it's just attractive.
I've got it actually.
I think it's just attractive as it is.
So it's a nice little coffee table, but so it's quite nice.
Okay, Tom, thanks very much, Tom and I will be talking present to Mums in another episode.
But thanks very much, Tom, for today and talking all about dailias.
Oh, it's no problem.
It's been my pleasure.
Thanks so much.
Thank you.
I look forward to next week's episode.
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