If you are looking to expand into dahlias as a market crop, here is our best advice for processes and infrastructure to ensure the best looking and longest lasting blooms. Make sure to also check out our posts on marketing and recommended dahlia varieties that have worked well for us in the past at Triple Wren.

Dahlias do not have an extremely long shelf life. They’re a very perishable product! This fact means that we did our best to harvest them at their prime, gave them excellent post-harvest care, ensured that logistics continued that care, and got them into their retail environment as quickly as possible.

To achieve this, we:

• Watered well the evening before harvest to ensure a super-hydrated cut.
• Harvested only between sunrise and 10:30AM so that cuts stayed cool.
• Harvested directly into clean buckets with cold water + a 1/4th of the recommended rate CVBN tab from Chrysal (we bought directly from the company), which increased acidity (which aids water take-up) and also acted as a bactericide.
• Moved buckets directly from the field into a 40º cooler for at least a 12-hour conditioning period before shipping.
• Chose logistics suppliers with refrigerated trucks so that the chilling time was not interrupted on the way to retail environment.
• Chose reliable logistics suppliers who would pick up on time and care for the flowers en route.

Before we moved too many flowers to handle them ourselves in our our 1980’s station wagon (and after that an old Ford pickup truck with a hand-me-down topper!), we always transported them when it was dark outside in order to keep them as cool as possible. We found that allowing our dahlias to heat back up to room temp and then be re-chilled at any point in the process after picking drastically reduced their shelf-life/vase-life. Avoiding this scenario and sticking to our cold-chain standards gave us an excellent product and a reputation for consistency. 

If you follow these processes, you should expect your dahlias to last 1-2 days transport/on-the-shelf plus 4-5 days in a post-purchase home environment after they leave your flower farm.

One thing to keep in mind when deciding how to transport your dahlias is remembering the value of your time. Before we hired a logistics company to transport/deliver for us, we purchased a refrigerated 20′ box truck to haul our blooms. After a few years of deliveries,  we crunched numbers on Steve’s time to deliver, gasoline, and truck maintenance and  we realized that a better (profit-driven) choice was to outsource that slice of our lives. On paper, the money was just about the same, but there is so much more to consider. We asked questions like, “Is this activity best for our family and Steve’s health?” and “Is this the best use of Steve’s strengths/gifts/time?” Or another way of putting it – “Would we pay someone a CEO salary to drive a box truck?” {Nope.} We wanted to get to the point where we were working ON our business more than IN it for so many reasons, but stating that as one of our goals, and then letting that goal inform our plan trickled down into so many basic business operation decisions. We can move with purpose when we set goals, then work big-to-small to plan, implement, and achieve them.