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Craig Sailor is the Arts & Entertainment editor at The News Tribune. Last year he planted his first vegetable garden. Focusing on unusual varieties, “Freak of Nature” returns for 2008 with a new crop of uncommon vegetables and flowers. This year he’ll try yin yang beans, giant pumpkins, blue poppies and mutant sunflowers. He gardens at his North End Tacoma home and sneaks seeds in to his mother’s garden at Willapa Bay when she’s not looking. E-mail him at craig.sailor@thenewstribune.com.

Sue Kidd is the Lifestyle Editor at The News Tribune and the ringleader for the Home&Garden section. She is a decent vegetable gardener, but occasionally a tragic mess at growing other stuff. She’ll blog about gardening events, gadgets, her weird obsession with guerrilla gardening and all her assorted garden disasters. E-mail her with thoughts/rants/questions/bizarre observations. sue.kidd@thenewstribune.com.

More gardening blogs:
Greengirl
"Starting seeds, dreading weeds."

You Grow Girl
"Gardening for the people."

Between Plow and Wood
"Meditations on farming, nature, food, art, sustainability, the environment and rural living."

Downtown Tomatoes
"A gardening club for the rest of us."

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A Gardening Blog
Tuesday, July 29th, 2008
Posted by Sue Kidd @ 05:15:09 pm

Reader Nan Maynard of Tacoma called me yesterday afternoon with a question about dahlia tubers. I was glad for the break. I was swamped, thanks to my fellow editor Craig Sailor being strapped with reader rep duty this week (call him at 253-597-8432 to complain about, well, anything. He deserves the torture).

"I got tubers from a friend, but they've been in a box for three years. Can I replant them?" Nan asked.

I paused. Dahlias in a box? For three years. Yikes. Then I remembered the summer of 2005 when I moved and lost a bag of tubers. I found them in a random box in my garage in 2007 and planted them. They came up just fine. I told Nan my previously lost dahlias are shooting out of the ground right now. They seem ok.

But what if I was just lucky? Can dahlias survive three years locked away in a lonely little box? Nan swears they have been stored outside and they haven't seen any light.

Your thoughts?

In the meantime, I've got a call in to Connell's Dahlias in Tacoma. We'll see what they say.

Categories: Q & A, Flowers

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