Your season does start fairly late there Rob. One of my paeoniifolius flowered but that's now long gone. The bulbifers went crazy with about a dozen of them flowering, last one withered not long back. Glad they've finished. The smell wasn't that overwhelming, just persistent. Next time I'm going to cull the flowers before they open. The konjacs are all up but no flowering yet. Symonianus, albispathus and galbra are all up as well. One of the titanums is still dormant, the other powering along now that the wet is kicking in. The oldest leaf cutting withered finally but the tuber is about the size of a large seed. Planted it in with the dormant one as the pot is extra large. The gigas hasn't started growth again, but it usually had a year's break after growing for a year. Maybe it's taking a year off for having flowered. Your titanums are looking good. My seedlings produced multiple stems the first couple of years, sometimes three simultaneously. Now they only have the one at a time and have a dormant period as well. I was hoping my dormant one would start growing now so that I could get a few more leaf cuttings at the start of the wet.

Kelly, okay, after visiting other sites and reading a lot on this site in particular, I think the best thing to do is to dig them up, wash the dirt off, let the tubers dry, dust them with some sulphur or powdered fungicide to discourage any rot, put them in the foot part of pantyhose with at least 12-18" of the leg portion left, and hang them up in a cool closet for winter storage. Kelly is a non-gender specific name, so I don't know if you're male or female. If male, go to the dollar store if you're not married, and buy some cheap knee-high pantyhose. Or, and this is a method I learned about on the dahlia forum, and I think this would be great for aroid tubers as well. After dusting with sulphur/fungicide, wrap them tightly in saran wrap, and store them in boxes in a cool location, between 35-50 degrees. Dahlia tubers rot easily, too, so I am assuming that if this works well for them, it will probably work well for aroids. I am going to try it for some of my tubers of more common aroids - like C. Illustris and Black Magic - easily replaceable ones. Apparently, it is not the issue of air circulation, but the issue of keeping them dry and rot-potential-free. The tubers have to be dry, totally dry. Another woman used shredded paper to store hers in, and the saran wrap. She said the tubers in saran wrap fared much better. Susan

If you look carefully at the tuber, you should see some tiny hair-like roots coming out of one end. That is the bottom. Sure, plant them in a pot and see whether they grow. I am just now potting some up, as they are just now starting to break dormancy. I agree, it is hard to tell the top and bottom of some. I also purchased some which fell apart. Actually when I started looking at them, I realized fairly quickly that there were several tubers wrapped around each other. I actually slowly twisted them apart, and got potentially more plants for the price of one. Now that is a good thing. Not all tubers will produce plants as some are there merely to store food. There needs to be an eye, and some eyes are very hard to see at first. I examined one just yesterday, and thought that there would probably be no plant coming from this particularly huge tuber (10" long). This morning, I can see the eye has swollen, and I know that I will have a beautiful red cactus style dahlia this summer which will grow to about 4 feet. Yahoo ! That is one I really wanted to save and multiply. Here is a small tuber, somewhat similar on both ends, but there are roots on one. These have developed over the past few weeks in a moist mixture. Originally, one could hardly tell the difference. That is why I lay it horizontally to help me determine where the roots are. Once planted the top end will definitely be up. Here is what a typical dahlia from the package looks like. Notice the stem. As you can see, there are many eyes on this one. Some folks like to cut off all but one eye. I like to get my exacto knife out and split them, making more plants. Read up about that first though. Here is a long tuber. One can hardly see the difference. If one looks VERY closely at the right hand side, one sees the eye starting to develop. Here is a closeup of the developing eye....starting to leaf. Isn't Mother Nature wonderful?

Actually, plantlady, Dahlias are a lot like potatoes. The Aztecs used to grow them for the tubers, which they harvested like potatoes and cooked with like potatoes. I have taken cuttings even with no roots and they root within 3 weeks if kept moist. Last year I made a whole collection of 80 plants of about 50 varieties for my mother starting with little or no roots. The plants still grew to full size and, remarkably, had full tubers at the end of the season. There was no way to tell the difference between these and the ones planted with full tubers. Dahlias are extremely forgiving and resilient. You should feel free to experiment if you want to make more plants. By the way, I didn't even chill my tubers this year. I left them in grow bags full of soil and stacked them up in the back of my heated greenhouse and didn't water them. Out of 213, only 2 have yet to come back--they began sprouting in March when the temperatures in the greenhouse turned tropical. They are all about 2 - 3 feet tall now and it's getting crowded in there. I think there are a lot of myths surrounding the the care and handling of the tubers. Stories get handed down and everyone forgets to experiment.