[Casey76]

When should one lift summer flowering bulbs?

I have the border in my front garden to sort out.  Must remember to bury the bulbs a little deeper, and put a mini fence up to disocugage the chooks for digging up the bulbs before they flower 

[tode]

Which particular bulbs are you thinking of, Casey ?

[Casey76]

Gladioli and Dalhlias mainly.

Though I was wondering if I should also lift the tulips and daffs, even if it is just to separate the clumps?

[tode]

Tulips and daffs you can def leave.

I'm too "lazy" to dig up glads, and they come up year after year, like the crocosmias.

Dahlias, bit trickier. Last year I dug up half and stored in garage:  they all went rotten. The half I left in ground came up OK, and we had -14° here. Depends if your soils drains well, I think.  Better take the experts advice, who'll be along shortly ......

How cold does it get round your way ?

[Casey76]

Hmm, it can get pretty cold.  Last year it was -18°C during the night and up to -5°C during the day for about  3 weeks.  But everyone agrees that it was a very cold winter last year.

But we can probably expect cold temps and a fair bit of snow after Christmas.

[tode]

I heard somewhere that you can leave dahlias in the ground once they're cut down, if you protect them from too much rain by covering with a roof tile or similar.
Think that Yabba is the tame dahlia expert, but probably others as well.
Can you edit the thread title to include "dahlias": that should wake em up.
Cheers

[Roll Roll]

Gladies I leave in and they do fine, as long as the chickens dont dig them up.

[Yabba]

Did I just get called tame? :shock:

Ok, Dahlia tubers are fairly close to the surface, they can survive our winter in blackpool, but we tend to have mild winters.

What we try to do is :

Come the end of the showing season ( about now ), we switch them all to a, weekly, high potash food and cut the plants down to knee high ( you can leave them a lot longer in gardens, we just work showing season to showing season )

Leave them a  month and cut them down again ... they really like to live

Come end of novemeber we cut them all down to surface level, dig up all the tubers and select the ones we want for next year, these are stored upside down ( so water drains out of neck ) in a frost free but "cool" place ... due to circumstances it was februaury before we dug them up this year

Next year, slap the tubers in some soil, add a smidge of water and a dash of heat ( around february for us, but we have heated beds ... you could probably aim for early april, with your weather, without heated beds ... or early to mid-may here ), and watch them take off.Then take cuttings and get dozens of plants off a single tuber

¥

[tode]

Sounds easy when you say it like that