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A Complete Guide to Digging, Dividing, Storing, and Growing Dahlias
Dahlias are a favorite among gardeners for their stunning blooms and long growing season. To keep your dahlias thriving year after year, it’s important to properly dig, divide, store, and wake up your tubers during the late fall and into winter months. In this guide, I will walk you through everything you need to know, from lifting your tubers in the fall to planting them out around Mother’s Day weekend. How and When to Dig and Divide Dahlia Tubers Dahlias are not frost-hardy, so the best time to dig them up is after the first frost blackens the foliage. This usually happens in late fall, depending on your climate. For…
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Nurturing a Winter Wonderland: My Essential Flower Farming Practices
As winter settles in, many people tuck away their gardening gloves and wait for spring. But for flower farmers like me, winter isn’t a time to step back—it’s an opportunity to lay the groundwork for next season’s blooms. Here at Ross Flower Farm in the beautiful Skagit Valley of Washington, I’ve come to embrace winter as a season of preparation, care, and quiet anticipation. There’s something deeply rewarding about tending to my flower farm in the crisp air, knowing that each small effort now will bring bursts of color in just a few months. So let’s grab a warm drink, bundle up, and dig into the ways you can nurture…
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Finding My Way Back: Grief, Healing, and Moving Forward
How does one begin to express themselves after experiencing the deepest and most difficult loss of their life? I suppose I’ll start with the name of the grief I’ve been navigating, so you have a foundation to understand the rest of this post. Complicated Grief “In complicated grief, painful emotions are so long-lasting and severe that you have trouble recovering from the loss and resuming your own life.” Let’s get into it. The last time I wrote a blog post, I had just learned that my ex-husband was missing. He hadn’t been seen since the beginning of the month. The moment I found out, I reached out to his twin…
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A Dahlia Cutting Drama: A Comic Guide to Propagating Your Prized Petals!
Ah, the delicate dance of dahlia cuttings! It’s like orchestrating a symphony with clippers and compost. Picture this: you’re standing in front of your awakening tubers, scissors in one hand, determination in the other, ready to propagate your prized petals. But wait! Before you dive into this floral frenzy, let’s take a whimsical walk through the wondrous world of dahlia cuttings. Act One: The Dahlia Cutting Conundrum You approach your dahlia tuber showing it’s first sprout with the grace of a ballerina and the precision of a surgeon. “To snip or not to snip,” you ponder dramatically, like a Shakespearean actor contemplating the fate of a dashing hero. With a…