Robert Herrick reminds us that all flowers fade in time, but you can encourage more buds and beauty by cutting off blossoms from your dahlia plants as they pass their prime. This keeps the plants from producing seeds and allows the energy to go into new blossoms. It has the added benefits of keeping your garden tidy and giving you an excuse to be spending time outside as the weather turns to fall. Vanessa filled a bucket with spent blossoms this week and found it a lovely break from computer-work preparing for shipping season.

If life keeps you from checking on the plants as often as you’d like, you may not catch every blossom before it has shed all its petals, and they may be harder to spot. In fact, early seed pods can look at first glance like a bud! You can tell them apart – most of the time – because dahlia buds usually are shaped like flattened balls, while seedpods are longer and look more like a cone.This is especially true for singles, but if you look for other buds on the plant you’ll be able to see the difference for a particular variety and perhaps fill a bucket yourself!

September is also a great time to strip a few lower leaves off the plants. This increases air circulation and allows you to tie a tag (we use flagging tape and a sharpie) around the stem with the variety name so that you’ll know what it is when you dig them up after frost.

As nights become cooler, you may start to see powdery mildew on dahlia leaves. You can make your own spray to treat this by using either Neem oil or the Massachusetts Master Gardeners mix of a few drops of liquid dish soap and a teaspoon of baking soda in a quart of water. You may need to repeat this treatment if you have a particularly wet fall.