James and the Giant dahlias
When I saw the James Wong seed packet I was tempted – dahlia yams – that’s surely got to be a double whammy for the vegetable patch. Not only do you get a substantial vegetable crop, you get a few flowers into the bargain. What’s not to like about that?
To be fair, in my rush of enthusiasm to embrace a new crop and usher it into the garden regime I should have taken into account my previous attempts at growing any kind of root vegetable.
Thecarrots had been a miserable failure, infested by something or other but probably carrot fly. They came out of the ground looking less like baby veg and more like micro veg.
The potatoes I planted were few and far between, harvested equally between myself and an unidentifed burrowing animal. With the Jerusalem artichokes I had a reasonable first year. But they were a real pain to prepare and cook, and then they lurked around the beds for seasons afterwards begging to be given another chance.
Don’t mention the salsify which I was inspired to plants after watching Gardener’s World – like the Rolling Stones I can’t get no salsifaction.
None of the above gave a floral display before bitterly disappointing me with the end product, so dahlia yams had got to be a winner. Unless, they turned out blind. The other vicarious pleasure I got from them was that my wife hates dahlias. So slipping them into one of the raised beds was like getting a dwarf conifer or a chrysanthemum or a tray of geraniums through the gate. Usually they’d be barred on entry.
Dahlia yams seem easy enough to germinate; they grew quickly in standard compost but were slow to add develop when they were planted in terra slightly more firma. Slugs loved them and I would regularly repulse flotillas of them that had set sail across the wide open spaces I had left between each plant.
My hope when I started out was to get a few flowers. The result was something else. Once they started flowering in August, they kept on flowering all the way through September into October and I still had flowers left in November. They were not dahlia yams, they were Michaelmas dahlias.
As a former beekeeper it was heaven to have them in the garden. Our raised bed became Heathrow Airport Terminal 3 for anything that buzzed; honey bees, bumble bees and solitary bees hovered and stacked themselves in flight around the flowers waiting to get in and land (see below).
From a slow start they bushed out and overflowed the space around them. They charmed everyone who saw them, “What are those?” people exclaimed, while dodging out of the way of an incoming flight of dumbledors.
Even my wife liked them. When it came to harvesting them after the first frosts it was a profound anti-climax. All that top growth produced very small tubers. James Wong on his Homegrown Revolution website admits “Sadly, as they have been bred from hundreds of years exclusively for the size and colour of their flowers, the flavour of dahlia ‘yams’ is rather variable, spanning from amazingly sweet and waxy – like a Jersey Royal spud – to perfectly edible but a little watery.”
Ours were a bit like small turnips.
However, they were grown from seed and presumably if you lift the tubers, store them overwinter and plant them again in the spring you’ll get a much bigger dahlia yam experience second time round. Which is what we’ll do. They earn their place in the garden for their longevity and their attractiveness to bees.
The question is… can I smuggle more plants into the garden this way – how about making a case for chrysanthemum strawberries…?
