Fergie’s Annual Dahlia Tuber Dividing

Where it started: huge dahlia clumps collected from Ferg’s dahlia plants. Ferg is wearing the Mary Morag T Hat.

It has now become a tradition that I travel down to Sydney to visit my brother Fergus each year and during the trip we divide up the dahlia clumps he’s saved into individual tubers.

I’d love to say that we work as a team on this but Ferg hates breaking the tubers apart and I love it! You have to be ruthless with tearing them apart and you really need a sharp pair of snips to get in there to massacre them apart.

The most important part for anyone breaking them apart is that tubers are only viable if they are connected to the central ‘mother stem’ which runs through the middle of each clump. You’ll see below that each tuber we collected has a knobbly bit of yellow on the top - this is the part that was connected to the main stem and if it doesn't have a piece connected to this, it’s unlikely to be a viable tuber and grow flowers next time you plant it.

Ferg started with 6 clumps of tubers collected from his beautiful red Tom’s Dahlias and we ended up with 40 individual tubers, way more than enough to plant a tonne of flowers again on September 4 on our brother Tom’s birthday. Once we collected the dahlia tubers it was Ferg’s time to shine by purging his backyard of all the dirt from our dahlia dividing and cleaning it to a pristine shine. I don’t know how he does it! #inspo

Some of the steps we took along the way to new tubers including splitting and washing them (above) and a flower from the beautiful red Tom’s Dahlia that the tubers were originally collected from

Where it ended up: over 40 super healthy dahlia tubers and the sparkling clean area after Ferg got to it!

Ferg’s Sydney garden in bloom last summer, with the dahlias in the top left corner

Looking for more information? Check out my take on When To Plant Dahlias In Sydney and Dahlia Tubers For Sale: 2023 Season On Now!