Diseased Dahlia?

[vfem]

My Park Princess Dahlia has leaves browning and falling off. The buds quit blooming and just turn brown and die before they open. I have it in a pot on my porch. Honesty, from the look of the huge brown lesions on the leaves.... looks like blight?! Is that possible? This is a new dahlia, in a new pot, in new soil!?

If this is so, do I have to destroy it? Is it over?

 

[lesa]

Does that pot have good drainage, v? It almost sounds like too wet... Why not remove all the damaged foliage, and cut it back- see what happens....I had one funny looking cuke and I panicked and thought "blight". Turns out blight doesn't affect cukes, not sure about dahlia's - but I would doubt it. Really seems to be a battle this year, doesn't it?!

 

[vfem]

I am battling things I didn't know existed! I swear its like 2-3 diseases per plant... now seeing things on my flowers is killing me!

I'm thinking about moving the dahlia into the ground rather then the pot.

But I've removed the bad leaves several times now... its getting worse and worse.

 

[digitS']

They do like well-drained soil, Lesa. I think that there are very few reasons for dahlias to like it here but, they seems to like it. Well-drained soil, I got. (Did you know that Kalispell Montana is (or, at least "was") a very important dahlia growing center? Of all places! They must just barely have time to bloom and be identified.

Anyway, a knowledgeable group of dahlia growers told me a couple of years ago to NOT fertilize during the growing season. What!? I'd thought that since they are such large plants that dahlias would need lots of fertilizer and would I just kept socking the Miracle-gro to them right thru until the weather started getting cold. Still . . . I'd had problems that I associated with them getting too much fertilizer.

I'm not much of a diagnostician but dark streaks in the stems right up to the flower buds, hmmm? Sometimes the buds wouldn't open properly, sometimes the buds died before they'd even gained any size. Anyway, I was inclined to believe that fertilizer might be the problem.

They go into my best garden soil each year. And, I used a balanced fertilizer before planting but, beginning last year, that was it . . . no more fertilizer.
Things went really well last year . . . Maybe I was "loving the dahlias to death."

Steve

Look for webbing under those leaves, V. Then, pull out your magnifying glass to see if there are any moving specks - spider mites. They can love dahlias to death, really and truly. Mites are the bane of dahlias during hot weather.