homemommy you have multiple shoots because whatever divisions you have in those pots had multiple eyes that are all growing successfully. No problem with that unless you want to observe the "one stalk" per plant guideline for optimal flowers. You can just keep breaking off the extra shoots, leaving maybe one or two for insurance, and the extras will eventually get the hint and cease to re-remerge.

I let a couple plants grow multiple stalks last year and regretted it. Much better quality flowers from a single stalked, topped plant, and easier to manage keeping the plant upright with ties, let alone fewer stalks to cut in winter.

Someone else can answer about the potroots. Humans cause them intentionally, not a disease process or other outside force.

Thanks Pochella;

If anyone has any more insight on Potroots I would really appreciate it.

Last night I took a look at how several of my January planted tubers where growing. I had several stems coming up from each one. I believe they where a "potroot" that I hacked away at (I mean cut with percision to separate the tubers with eyes... yah right!)

Anyway, I took the root ball, it was holding the soil all together in the pot pretty well. I ran it under water to separate away the soil with causing the least damage to the new roots. I was amazed at what I saw!

I had a single mother tuber, or in some cases the mother tuber had already rotted away. And each shoot had a new baby tuber! All the baby tubers where sort of wielded to gether at the top, but with a knife, where not hard to separate. Now, some of these original plants where up to 8" tall, (they where that tall dispite being pinched back a few times)

So, in total I took 4 of my plants, washed away the soil, freed the new baby tubers and repotted them. Now I have 5 larger plants, these would have been the stalks I would have chose to grow on if I wanted a single stalk plant. But, instead of just cutting off the other stalks, I have an additional 9 little, (3-5") plants, complete with their own little tubers!

I was not sure if this would cause them to go into shock, but they are looking great today, about 18 hours later. I am keeping them out of strong light, I'll start weaning them back into the greenhouse starting tommorow.

So, from my observations, what appeared to happen, was all the extra eyes I allowed to grow on, started growing their own tubers, so when I separated them 6 weeks after eying up, I got a small plant, complete with its own root system.

So... When you don't allow a tuber to grow extra stalks, does it still form a clump of tubers?

It appears to me that this thread is talking about "potbound" tuber clumps and not "potroots". Many commercial growers produce miniature tuber clumps and sell them as "potroots" They are dahlias grown from cuttings that are left in a small pot the entire growing season. They are in my mind a superior product over tubers as they are much quicker to sprout when planted.

People use many terms, and often they don't mean the same thing to different people who use them.

I grew all my Dahlias last year (~200) in 4" pots. They started indoors, and were planted in the beds that way (~4" below the surface of the soil.)

The result was a lot of difficult to separate tuber clumps. Granted, they were much easier to lift in the fall, and all plants grew to expected sizes.

The idea, as I read it, was to store the tubers in their pots over the winter, and in the spring bring them out to have them start sprouting. The sprouts would then be taken as cuttings and an entirely new plant started (or many.) The original pot tuber could be planted, thrown away, eaten, etc...

Separating tubers is needed if you don't want to take cuttings, but do want more plants next year from those you grow this year. If you learn how to take cuttings, the tubers themselves will be redundant when you come to plant out.

Cheers,
Russ

Thanks so much for the further info.

Russ, that is a very interesting point about the cuttings. I actually am growing some cuttings this year and having really good luck with them! I don't know if you have been following my saga with some tubers I recieved from my mother in law last year, but to make a long story short, they where very badly mistreated and did not store very well overwinter. I was very fortunate to have 4 tubers out of about 15 sprout, 3 of which provided viable sprouts that could be harvested. I have taken 7 cuttings so far, all have rooted, and just tonight I was able to take another 5, keeping my fingers crossed ;-)

I like the idea of taking cuttings, I suppose next winter I will do my best to harvest the tubers, but definately cuttings will be something I do next spring! It seems to me an easy way to get many plants out of only one or two tubers!