Dahlias are my jam.
My story
My name is Tanya, and I am the woman behind the flowers. I’ve been growing flowers since I was a small girl since my mom was a master gardener and always had a beautiful garden. I started growing dahlias the spring of 2017 and fell in love. I even moved from the city to the country to have more space for my dahlias! It’s safe to say that my small hobby has turned into quite the obsession.
For my day job, I am a Field Application Scientist. Prior to my current roll, I was a Research Scientist at Iowa State University and was involved in plant and animal research. My passion for dahlias has extended into hybridizing. Each year, I collect thousands of dahlia seeds to plant. Seeing the new dahlia varieties each year is definitely one of my favorite parts of walking through my 1/2 acre dahlia patch in the summer and fall.
Grown with care
Being a molecular biologist, I am extremely diligent in mitigating disease in my dahlias. Any plant showing signs of disease is culled immediately, I perform random testing at my local agriculture extension office (Iowa State University), implement crop rotation, am inspected by the Iowa State Department of Agriculture, and my flower snips are sanitized with 10% bleach between each cut to prevent potential disease transfer. To reduce the chance of disease spread through insects, I utilize beneficial nematodes, yellow sticky traps, perimeter trap cropping (my masters thesis), and occasionally limited and mindful insecticide application.