Protecting dahlias against attack

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I feel like I am in a Tom and Jerry cartoon.  All this work I am doing to keep the mole rats out of my dahlia pots and I feel they are all lined up on the fence behind me, laughing at my exploits.

This little project took hours. And may or may not work.

But it was gorgeously sunny and I had a brain wave about the pots.

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I loathe how expensive large garden pots are. They are only plastic after all. Are we paying for the holes in the bottom rather than the material?  I was running errands in town yesterday and had large pots on my list.  The ones in the garden centre were over seven euros a post.  And these were destined to just be sunk into the ground.

Aesthetics had no role to play here.

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So when I was in the hardware store buying my chicken wire to put over the tops of the pots, I spied plastic buckets.  85 cents a go. And these are large.  So they went into the shopping cart and I hummed with happiness all the way home.

All I needed to do was drill holes in the bottom and prize off the metal handles.  I even went rummaging in my potting shed for all the plastic buckets that have holes, have gone beyond their primary use, and could get the same treatment.

So twelve in all.

Up came the dahlia tubers.  Now as you can see they have been a bit restricted here. I put them in plastic plant pots two seasons ago and sunk them in the ground.

Here is a reminder of  how fab they have been in flower.

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The root restriction hasn’t harmed them.  But there was no way I was going to do anything but cut them out of their restrictive corsets to release them.

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Boy, that felt mean. At least I have been feeding and watering them all this time.

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So with half a bucket of home made rich compost, and garden soil, the tubers went into their sparkling large new accommodation. And back into the soil.

A thick thick mulch of leaves and leaf mould over the top. And then I remembered the chicken wire.

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So off came the mulch and I cut out the wire and placed that over the top of every bucket of plant.

Sorry the pictures are so graphic. If it works I’ll be so thrilled.

I had best soothe your eyes with the reason why I persist in all this work for just some flowers. They give and give and give some more.  From early summer to November.

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