Most important with winter storage is constant temps (41-55 degrees the best) with some humidity to keep them from drying out. Lots of different ways to store them, but if you have the constant cool temperature and a bit of air moisture, you are on your way.

Storage is like shoes... There are a thousand styles of shoes, but the main goal is to help you travel from here to there. To pick the style that works for you, sometimes you have to 'try on' lots of different ones.

hi , i'm in my 4th year of growing dahlia 's and i'm finding my basement too warm .... i'm considering storing my tubers in my shed but i'm afraid it might be too cold,,, i'm near niagara falls Ontario,,, zone 5 I think,, i'm thinking of packing the card board boxes that my plants are in with newspaper to help insulate them ,,,,, any ideas would be helpful,,,

thanks in advance ...

If there is no supplemental heat, they will most likely freeze in the shed. Even insulated, sustained temps in the twenties will do them in. But this is easy to test... Take waste tubers with no eyes and wrap them how you described. Cut into them after the first week-long cold spell and see if the inside starch is white and crisp, or translucent and moist. Either way, consider heating the shed using a thermostat heating unit and a backup remote thermometer for you to monitor from your house before you gamble all your stock in storing them out there.

Too warm is better then too cold. What is the issue you are struggling with? Rot, mold, shriveling, sprouting? Insects, varmints?

shriveling...... past 2 years the tubers were very dry and shriveled so I think my basement is too warm ....one year I covered them in peat moss and that made them worse,,, to the point where I had to soak them in a pail of water to hydrate them in the spring.

Warmth has nothing to do with that problem... I store in 60-65 degrees all winter, and shriveling is not an issue as long as they are covered. There is lots of humidity in my cellar, though.

Peat moss can be extremely variable in composition and moisture level depending on the supplier and location it is dug from. I've heard that the rule of thumb with peat moss moisture is 'cool to the touch' for adequate moisture in storage. Sopping wet will rot the tubers for sure.

You might consider vermiculite as a storage medium, adding one cup water to five gallons and mixing well.

I would recommend avoiding sealing the tubers in plastic; however, with that said, wrapping each individual tuber in plastic wrap is one technique some growers use with success.

Trial and error is the best way to learn what works best for you, and I'd suggest splitting each variety into different storage methods so you can compare in spring which had the best success and which you want do the following year.

Has anyone on this thread tried leaving their dahlias in the ground in a fairly northern clime (with deep mulch?) My dahlias are still in the ground on Nov. 14, but I have them covered with about 2 to 2 1/2 feet of dry leaves, and then a tarp over the leaves to keep rain and snow from making the soil too wet. I cut them back to about six inch stems after our first killing frost around Nov. 6. This is is northern Colorado along the front range, not in the mountains. My problem is that I don't have much indoor storage space (an unheated attached garage), and the temperature in it varies pretty widely with the weather. I'd like to leave them in the ground 'til spring if that will succeed.

I have a grower friend in zone 5/6 that has left a clump in to let it rot, and it's come back twice to haunt him. It's in a fairly protected location at the lee of a hill under a tree.

I heard about a grandma in a mid-northwestern state that apparently always cuts the stem to the ground, tarps and piles high over that. Her granddaughter told me that if you switch the layers, you invite rodents to nest in the mulch.

There's one gentleman grower that might still be on here that was experimenting with a dahlia cloche, and had success burying his DUG tubers in one area and insulating well. I don't remember the specifics of it, or if it was successful enough for him to continue doing it.

i have never had any abandoned uninsulated dahlias come back in zone 5, and as I have never wanted to have 'surprises' in the spring to mess up my new planting diagram in the rows, I haven't bothered insulating. Perhaps I should do that for a couple extras in the overflow garden. Maybe a black garbage bag with leave mulch on top.

One thought about overwintering in the ground... There are some fickle varieties like Wynns Eeek, Jennie and Sellwood Glory that tend to not keep overwinter in the best of conditions, and then there are some like Carmen Fiesta, Chilstons Pride and Mingus Toni that have close to indestructable tubers. I'd ask some long-time growers about the varieties that didn't make it before condemning the experiment, as it might just be the fickle varieties that fail would have done so regardless of storage type.

Please keep us abreast of your experimenting! I love hearing about such things!

Thanks, cici, for the response and helpful information. Maybe we'll hear from others who have experimented with their own innovations and successes or lack thereof. One question that comes to mind, "Do rodents eat dahlia tubers?" I know of one fellow dahlia fancier on the Colorado front range who worked part-time for a cemetery, digging graves with a backhoe. He used the cemetery backhoe to bury his dahlia tubers eight feet deep in the ground each fall, with excellent results.

WIth a BACKHOE? Ha ha! That's great! I need to get me one of those!

A vole ate my potroot of Hollyhill Tigress last winter, munching a hole to make a nest for himself. Mice got into a crate of tubers, and chopped the sprouted eyes clean off.

I've seen a tuber gutted from an underground rodent on FB this fall, and it looked like the tuber might even have a chance of making it overwinter. I've heard horror stories of varieties lost in greenhouses with mice nibbling all winter.

Truthfully, I bet those rodents need to be pretty hungry to chomp on tubers.

Hmm. Sounds like potential trouble for me. I've seen no evidence of voles at this location, fortunately, but there are plenty of mice around. Providing them with a nice, warm two-foot thick layer of leaves with a tarp over them to keep them dry and a possible food source in the ground underneath might just be mouse heaven. I may have to go to plan B, which is to bury the tubers in a single cache about two and a half feet deep, cover that with a tarp to repel snowmelt, cover that with hardware cloth to repel rodents, then refill with sand and cover that with a couple of feet of dry leaves and plastic or tarp. That may sound like a lot of trouble, but it's better than buying another $160 worth of dahlia tubers from Swan, which I did this year. Thanks for the rodent anecdotes!

Oh, goodness, that does sound like a lot of work... How about moth balls or appetizing poison bites sprinkled along the peremeter of the cloche to deter/distract potential rodents instead of the hardware cloth? What's to keep the rodents from going around to the edge? And actually, I doubt very much that rodents would dig through sand. Just playing devils advocate... I am far from a rodent expert!

Just don't bother trying mint...I put a prepackaged sachet of corncobs permerated in peppermint oil in with a crate last year, listening to the advertisement and reviews that swore they would keep mice away. I found the bag torn up with the cob scattered and nibbled on. But the tubers were mostly left alone, at least! ;-)

Here's a thought- why don't you make a small box up of single tubers, put some type of storage medium to insulate them, and tuck it in the back of a closet until spring as a safeguard. The small box might just save you if something unexpected happens with your cloche. I've been saved from my slow learning curve multiple times by storing tubers of the same varieties different ways. Storage is a tough one to master if you don't have the ideal conditions and space.

I most always leave my tubers in the ground. I just cut them down in late Nov, then either heavy duty aluminum foil or doubled plastic bags over the stumps. then I mulch heavily with grass clippings. Only one year did I loose them all.

Yesterday I noticed some of the grass looked like it was pooching up, and it looked like a hole on one side. I immediately thought a mouse was under there. On closer inspection, it was the dahlia growing, at least 4 inches under all the grass and plastic. It's too early to uncover, still freezing at night. I guess I'll just leave the whole thing alone. I started to look at others and found more growing. Now I'm wondering if I should water just a little. Our winter moisture has been only.51 hundredths. Or just leave them alone?

This past winter was the first time I saved Dahlia tubers. It was much easier than I thought it would be to get them going this spring!

In winter, once temperatures got down to around 32 degrees at night, I dug up the tubers (brushed the dirt off of them gently) and put them in a grocery store-sized brown paper bag. There wasn't much dirt on the tubers to begin with and I didn't even bother cleaning the dirt that was left in the cracks. I didn't add anything inside the paper bag or do any tricks while storing the tubers in the bag. Just brushed them off and placed em in the (opened) bag....that's it!

I kept the tubers (sitting freely on the bottom of an opened brown paper bag) in my room until February...The temperature I kept them at was about 50-65 degrees.

In February I planted the tubers in a black plastic planter (8x12inches). They eventually sprouted 3 weeks later after putting the planter in a sunny/warm (around 60-65 degrees) window and after keeping the top of the soil from drying out completely.

It's now April 2nd and the plant is still in the plastic container and it's looking amazing! It's been outside most days and it's only in at night when it's under 40-45 degrees.

I don't think it could've ended up easier than that, unless I kept the tubers in the ground! Perhaps I'll try that next winter with a different Dahlia plant!

flowergirl70ks, It sounds like your soil is very dry, but I think I would be cautious about watering. As I'm sure you know, dahlias need very little water until they start putting on serious growth. Do you plan to dig and divide them later this spring? One thing I learned last year was not to replant large clumps of tubers. I did that with a couple of clumps that I had wintered over in the garage, and what they did was to send up waaaay too many shoots which crowded one another, and did not produce many flowers.

It's too early to plant dahlias outside here in Colorado, but I'm about to dig in under the leaves and tarp today and see if mine wintered over okay, or if they fell prey to the mice or the cold. Carrots and beets left in the ground nearby, and covered in a similar manner are still providing tasty ingredients for salads, so I have high hopes that the dahlias did as well.

Glad to hear about your success! What growing zone are you in? How deep was the snow this winter for you?

A lady who grows in 4/5 zone near Buffalo, NY has hundreds upon hundreds of dahlia plants each year, and sometimes it takes her all fall into January to dig/divide all of them. She says she loses the undug clumps only if it gets below zero with no snow cover. Sometimes her prolonged digging schedule causes her to lose lots, othertimes it works out just fine.

i would exercise caution with the in-soil overwintered clumps, as spring rains coupled with freezing nights can still rot them out. Not that I know how you could prevent it... Just something to watch for.