If you want to learn how to collect seeds off of your dahlias and breed new varieties, we dedicated an entire chapter to the subject in Discovering Dahlias, starting on page 88.
It is probably one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever grown! That season I collected as many seeds as I possibly could, and the following season we had enough to plant out a patch of 13,000 seedlings-an entire field block. Waiting for each new flower to open to see what emerged became addicting and I just couldn’t get enough. My first dahlia seedling patch consisted of a single bed (a few hundred plants) tucked in my backyard, and of all the things I grew that season that one little row was by far the most exciting. The first year I learned about how to breed new varieties, I collected some seed pods from my favorite varieties in the field and the hoop houses (‘Caf é au Lait’, ‘Appleblossom’, ‘Peaches N’ Cream’, and ‘Waltzing Mathilda’) and saved them aside to grow out the following season. And dahlia breeding certainly falls into that camp. It’s funny how my little side weekend projects inevitably become the next big thing we’re working on. breeding), I got completely swept up in the process and it has since become a huge part of my life.
Once I dipped a toe into growing dahlias from seed (i.e. It was actually a good 10 years into my journey with them that I learned that there was a difference between growing dahlias from tubers or cuttings, which is how you clone a variety, and growing them from seed, which is how you create or breed a brand new variety. When I started growing dahlias I had no idea that you could grow them from seed.
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