Dahlia dilemma

Saturday wasn't a very pleasant day. We had a strong north westerly wind all day making it feel pretty cold. Whilst we haven't actually had gale force winds it's been consistently windy for the last few days and I can't help but feel that April's brilliant growing weather is now been undone.

It would have been easy to give the plot a miss but I wanted to get some more tomato plants into the greenhouse so we did spend a rather windswept afternoon planting, weeding and transplanting cardoons and  young raspberry plants .

Plot greenhouse tomatoes

I'd never thought about not having more than one variety in a grow bag before as discussed on Mrs GL's blog. I've never noticed any problems from mixing varieties. Moneymaker and Amish Gold are our banker tried and tested varieties.

Having now decided to start again with new dahlias this year we're not sure how much space we should give to our dahlias raised from seed this year. The packet indicates heights of 1.0m for the plants.

Dahlias - Giant Hybrids Mixed - from seed

We managed to raise 30 seedlings so our dilemma is how much room to give them. Spacing them 1.0m apart seems a bit rash looking at the size of the plants at the moment. However our squash plants are even smaller at the moment and they take up as much space as I'm prepared to give them so perhaps current size is nothing to go by. Maybe a 1.0m spacing and if they don't perform the gaps will have to be inter planted with other crops.