For the last decade, and especially the last six years, around 30% of my farm has been grown from dahlia cuttings.
Not experimentally in a spare corner somewhere, but at production scale. Enough that the results mattered to my livelihood.
Over time I began noticing something interesting. The cuttings that seemed to make the best usable tuber clumps by the end of the season were often the ones transplanted very early, right as the first roots began emerging from the rooting cube.
A Milk & Honey dahlia cutting grown in a 3-inch pot for 3.5 months - in a larger pot or planted in the field, the root and tuber mass would become substantially larger.
At that stage, the roots would move rapidly outward into the potting soil, and by autumn I’d often end up with surprisingly good tuber formation.
Meanwhile, heavily rooted cubes that had sat too long sometimes behaved differently. The roots would circle inward, upward, or remain concentrated around the plug. The plants still grew perfectly well above ground, but underground I’d occasionally find masses of fibrous roots with minimal tuber development.
This is observational, not peer reviewed science. But after watching thousands upon thousands of plants over many seasons, the pattern became reliable enough that I changed how I propagated a significant portion of my farm.
That’s one thing I’ve always enjoyed about growing dahlias. Much of the “standard wisdom” in dahlia culture was never especially scientific to begin with. A lot of it has simply been repeated from grower to grower for generations. So I’ve never been afraid to experiment and quietly work things out for myself, whether that meant breeding unusual new forms, grafting varieties together, or simply paying close attention to what the plants seemed to respond to over time.
A few years ago, when rooted cuttings became more common commercially, customers would sometimes reach out to me about cuttings they had purchased from other growers that failed to make tubers well. Interestingly, they would sometimes discover that cuttings later taken from those same plants would suddenly tuberize beautifully. That resonated with what I had been observing on my own farm.
My theory, and again, I’m calling it a theory, is that early transplantation before a cutting becomes heavily root bound may encourage better outward root exploration and ultimately better tuber initiation.
So when I eventually decided to offer some of my own Bell’s Dahlias as rooted cuttings, I intentionally shipped them the same way I grow them myself: actively rooting, but not heavily root bound.
The goal was not to sell the most visually impressive plug for the moment it arrives in the mail. The goal was to ship a young, vigorous dahlia stem with active roots that could be potted up quickly, establish fast, and produce usable tubers within a single growing season, exactly as they do here on my farm.
That approach does require shipping earlier in the rooting process, while the roots are still safely held within the cube and just beginning to emerge.
The challenge, of course, is that horticulture sometimes trains people to expect maturity rather than potential. Walk into a garden center in spring and you’ll often see fully blooming tulips being sold in decorative pots. They look beautiful in the moment, but many of those bulbs weaken after that first season because so much energy has already been spent forcing flowers early for retail display.
My intention was something different. Not just something beautiful in the moment, but something functional long term.
A cutting that becomes a plant.
A plant that becomes a tuber clump.
A tuber clump that returns year after year.
And on my farm, grown this way, they do.