THE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY OF NEW YORK 



day. Light watering", as is the case with nearly all other garden 

 crops beyond the seedling stage, is often worse than nothing, 

 as it encourages the small rootlets to come to the surface, where 

 they are easily dried out or otherwise injured. 



Dahlias, as a rule, do best in a sunny location. If planted in 

 the shade, they make a weak spindling growth and have few 

 flowers. They usually do fairly well, however, when planted 

 near the side of a building, even on the north side, if they can 

 have four or five hours of direct sunlight a day. The vicinity of 

 trees, shrubs, and woody vines is to be avoided on account of the 

 drain that such strong-growing organisms always make upon the 

 food and moisture content of the adjacent soil, though these 

 unfavorable conditions may be mitigated to some extent by deep 

 cultivation and by copious watering and fertilizing. 



Time for Planting 



As to the best time for planting dahlias opinions vary widely, 

 some advocating early planting, some late, and some favoring a 

 compromise date. If one plants in April or early in INIay, the 

 plants often blossom by the first of July and then if, as so com- 

 monly happens, a summer drought follows and one cannot irri- 

 gate, the flower buds blast, the foliage turns yellow or looks 

 burnt, growth stops, the stems become hard and stiff, and that is 

 the end of the blossoming for the season. When one plants 

 later, say in June (for the vicinity of New York City and Long 

 Island Sound and southward) one does not get flowers so early 

 but is likely to get more of them in September and October when 

 they do come. The young plants, not yet flowering, are not so 

 much damaged by the hot dry weather of summer as older, larger, 

 flowering plants would be and when cooler weather comes and 

 they begin to blossom they keep it up until killed by frost. Much, 

 of course, depends upon one's location and the length of the 

 growing season. In the northern parts of New York and New 

 England, where killing frosts often come late in August or early 

 in September, it is desirable to plant as early as it is reasonably 

 safe to do so or even to start the plants in the house or under 

 glass before the season for safe transplanting in the open arrives. 

 There are great differences in the varieties as to earliness of 



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