24/08/2026
You can now PYO dahlias at Chippy Flower Farm 🌸😁. No need to book; we’re open 9-3 Monday to Saturday and we have a 1000 dahlias plants for you to choose from.
| Flower farm near Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire | PYO dahlias | Farm shop Little Tew | Days out in the Cotswolds
This is the story of how we grew those thousand plants, from cuttings taken earlier this Spring. From a bare 40m plot to one bursting with flowers six months later.
| dahlia propagation | how to grow dahlia plants | dahlia tips
It began with a visit to the dahlia geniuses at The Tetbury Flower Company in January. (They are an RHS-gold-winning team of dahlia growers with a gorgeous PYO dahlia plot just outside Tetbury.)
We came away with starter tubers for 28 different varieties.
At the beginning of February we potted them up and got them sprouting.
Early February: Dahlia tubers need a consistent 18-20 degrees to “wake up”, so this meant it all had to be done indoors. (Tubers are usually potted up later than this, but we needed to wake them up very early to give us time to grow the cuttings.)
The starter tubers were planted, deliberately shallow and horizontal, into crates lined with newspaper, which had been filled with just a couple of inches of damp-ish peat free compost. The tubers were laid out 10 to a crate, and covered lightly with more compost.
Tubers need heat to “wake up”. Underfloor heating (and understanding housemates) is ideal.
Once they had started sprouting, about a month later, we started taking cuttings: waiting for a sprout to have 4 leaves, then slicing it off the tuber with a sharp knife, dipping the end in rooting powder, and planting them in rows into seed trays.
Then, when they had grown strong roots, each cutting was potted up to grow on individually.
| taking dahlia cuttings | how to increase your stock of dahlias |
The plants were gradually hardened off, and once they were sturdy enough and the risk of frost had passed, they were planted out into a 40m long bed, all through May and June, staked and protected from deer.
They started to flower towards the end of July and are now flowering their socks off.
Want to know what else happens a
