I grow sixty dahlias in a suburban back yard that measures 40 by 70 feet, which leaves room for the clothesline and not much else, and I have never been happier with a piece of ground. My husband Gerald refers to the yard as "the plantation." He built the tuber shelves in the basement, so he may call it whatever he likes.

Why dahlias? Because no other flower gives you so much for so little. One tuber the size of a small potato, planted in May, becomes a four-foot plant that throws blooms from August until frost, and the blooms come in every color but blue and every size from a quarter to a dinner plate. Because a dahlia is a flower you work with: you stake it, you pinch it, you disbud it, and it rewards every bit of attention. And because in September, when the rest of the garden is tired, the dahlias are just getting started.

I am in USDA zone 6, with a last frost around the first of May and a first frost around the middle of October. Adjust for where you are. Everything below is what I do; it is also what the dahlia society tells its new members to do, which is not a coincidence, since I learned it from them.

When. Dahlias are tender. Plant after all danger of frost has passed and the soil has warmed to about 60°F, which here is the second or third week of May. A tuber planted in cold wet soil rots; a tuber planted two weeks later catches up and passes it.

Where. Full sun, at least six hours, and eight is better. Soil that drains. If water stands in your yard after a rain, build a raised bed or plant somewhere else. I work in compost every spring, and a little bone meal in the hole.

How. Dig a hole 4 to 6 inches deep. Lay the tuber on its side with the eye (the little sprout or bump near the neck, where the tuber joined last year's stalk) pointing up. Cover with 2 or 3 inches of soil at first, and fill the hole in as the shoot grows. Do not water until the shoot is up unless the ground is bone dry; the tuber has all the moisture it needs to sprout, and extra water only invites rot. Once the shoot is up, water normally.

Spacing. The big ones, 2 to 3 feet apart. Miniatures and pompons, 18 inches to 2 feet. I crowd mine a bit closer than I should, which is why there are sixty.

Stake at planting. Drive the stake into the ground before you set the tuber, about 2 inches to one side of where the eye will come up. If you wait until the plant needs a stake, you will drive it through the tuber. I use 6-foot wooden stakes for the large varieties and 4-foot for the rest, and paint the top 6 inches white so I can find them in the fall.

Label. Every stake gets a tag with the variety name. I also keep a map in a notebook, because tags fall off, and a dahlia without a name is a dahlia you can't enter in a show.

Tie as it grows. Loosely, with soft twine or strips of old pantyhose (Gerald's suggestion, and a good one), every 12 inches or so up the stake. The stems are hollow and snap in a summer storm if you let them go. A plant that goes over in August with forty buds on it is a sad thing.

Pinch. When the plant has three or four sets of leaves and is a foot or so tall, pinch out the growing tip, right above a set of leaves. This feels like vandalism the first time. What it does is force the plant to send up several side stems instead of one, and you get a bushier, stronger plant with many more blooms. I pinch everything, even the giants.

Disbud. This is the secret of the big flowers, and there is no other secret. A dahlia sets its buds in threes: a center bud with a smaller bud on each side. If you leave all three, you get three medium flowers on short stems, crowded together. If you pinch off the two side buds as soon as they are big enough to get your fingernails on, the plant puts everything into the center bud, and you get one large bloom on a long straight stem. For show stems I also remove the side shoots from the next set or two of leaf axils down, so the stem is clean. For the miniatures and pompons, which are supposed to be small, I disbud less.

Water deeply. Once the plants are established, a good soaking two or three times a week in hot weather, rather than a sprinkle every day. The roots go down where the water is. Dahlias in bloom are thirsty; a mulch of straw or shredded leaves once the soil is warm keeps the water in and the weeds down.

Feed lightly, and low on nitrogen. Too much nitrogen gives you a huge green plant and few flowers. I use a 5-10-10 type fertilizer, a light side-dressing when the plants are a foot tall and again in early August, and that's all. In late summer I stop.

Cut flowers. Cut in the early morning or evening, when the bloom is fully open (dahlias don't open further after cutting). Put the stems straight into a bucket of water. Some people plunge the stem ends in hot water first; I do, and I think it helps, and Gerald says I would think that. Cutting is good for the plant. The more you cut, the more it blooms.

Earwigs. Public enemy number one. They hide in the bloom by day and chew ragged holes in the petals by night, and a show bloom with earwig damage is a bloom that stays home. Traps: a rolled-up damp newspaper laid at the base of the plant in the evening, and in the morning shake it out into a bucket of soapy water. Or a shallow can (tuna, cat food) sunk to the rim and filled with a half inch of vegetable oil with a drop of soy sauce; they go in and don't come out. I run twenty of these from July on. They are not pretty. Neither are earwigs.

Slugs. They go for the new shoots in May and the low leaves all summer. Hand-picking after dark with a flashlight is unglamorous and effective. Beer in a saucer sunk to the rim works, and they die happy. A collar of crushed eggshell or sharp sand around a new shoot helps some. I don't use the old-fashioned slug baits because of the neighbors' dog, and I would not put them where a child could get to them either.

Aphids and spider mites. A hard spray of water from the hose, underneath the leaves, every few days when you see them. Insecticidal soap if they persist. Mites show up in hot dry weather and make the leaves look dusty and stippled; keeping the plants watered is most of the cure.

Powdery mildew. A white dusting on the leaves in late summer, worse in humid spells with cool nights. Good air circulation (don't crowd, she says, with sixty plants) and watering at the base rather than overhead. It rarely hurts the blooms.

Deer. I don't have them. If you do, I'm sorry, and a fence is the only thing I've heard of that works.

Dahlia tubers will not survive a zone 6 winter in the ground. Every fall they come up, and every spring they go back. This is the part that discourages people, and I will tell you honestly that it is a long weekend of work for sixty plants. It is also the part that makes them yours; a tuber you have dug, dried, stored and divided is a different thing from one out of a bag.

1. Wait for the first killing frost. The foliage turns black overnight. This is the signal. (If frost is late, I dig anyway the first week of November; the tubers need to come up before the ground gets cold and wet.)
2. Cut the stalks down to about 6 inches. Leave the tubers in the ground another week or so after the frost; this lets the eyes on the crown set up and makes them easier to see when you divide. Don't let water sit in the hollow stalks; a bit of foil over the cut end helps.
3. Dig carefully. A garden fork, not a spade, starting a foot out from the stalk all around, then lift from underneath. The tubers hang from the crown by narrow necks and the necks break easily. A tuber with a broken neck has no eye and is firewood.
4. Shake and rinse. Gently knock off the soil, then hose off the rest. Cut off any tubers that are damaged or rotten. Label the clump right now, with the variety name on a tag through the stalk, because in the basement in February they all look alike.
5. Dry the clumps upside down in a frost-free place (the garage, the porch) for a few days to a week, until the skin is dry to the touch and the cut stalk has dried out. Not too long, or they shrivel.
6. Store in boxes or crates, tubers packed in slightly damp peat moss (or vermiculite, or wood shavings; peat is what I use), at 40 to 50°F. Warmer and they sprout or shrivel; colder and they freeze. An unheated basement corner, a root cellar, or the crawl space. Mine live on Gerald's shelves along the north wall of the basement, where the thermometer reads 45 all winter.
7. Check them monthly. Throw out any that have gone soft. If they're shriveling, mist the peat lightly. If there's mold, more air and less damp.
8. Divide in spring. I divide in April, when the eyes have started to swell and I can see them. Cut the clump apart with a sharp knife so that each division has a piece of the crown with at least one eye. A tuber without an eye will never sprout, no matter how fat it is. Dust the cuts with sulfur, let them dry a day, and plant.

This year's dig will start whenever frost comes; I'm guessing the second week of October. I will report here.

The Twin Rivers Dahlia Society held its annual show on Saturday and Sunday, September 11 and 12, at the community center. I entered fourteen blooms and I am pleased to say ten of them came home with something. For those who haven't shown: blooms are entered in classes by size and form (AA is giant, over 10 inches across; A is large, 8 to 10; B is medium, 6 to 8; BB is small, 4 to 6; M is miniature, up to 4 inches; and then the balls, miniature balls and pompons have their own classes), and within those by color. The judges look at form, color, stem, foliage, and above all condition, which is where the earwigs get you.

The bloom is cut the night before or the morning of, staged in a bottle with the stem straight and the bloom facing forward at a slight upward angle, and your name goes nowhere near it until judging is over.

Five blues, three reds, two whites and a section award. My best year. The miniature ball has been a bridesmaid for three shows and I nearly wept. Gerald carried the boxes and did not once say "plantation," which I noticed.

Neighbors in the garden: Betty's Backyard Vegetable Patch · African Violet Addict · Giant Pumpkin Growing (Hank and I have discussed whose hobby is more ridiculous; it's a draw) · Willow Creek Garden Center · The Compost Pile · Monarch Waystation

Still to come: a page on taking cuttings in spring, and photographs, once the roll from the show comes back from the drugstore and I persuade Gerald to work the scanner.