The Cut Flower Podcast

Cultivating Unique Dahlias and the Art of Hybridisation with Kristine Albrecht

• Roz Chandler / Kristine Albrecht • Season 1 • Episode 104

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Text Agony Aunt Roz with your Cutflower Questions.

Welcome to the Cutflower Podcast!
In this episode, Roz interviews Kristine Albrecht, an award-winning Dahlia hybridiser, farmer, and vice president of the Monterey Bay Dahlia Society. Kristine shares her journey into dahlia cultivation and hybridisation, as well as insights into her unique approach to developing new dahlia varieties. With over 1,800 dahlias on her urban quarter-acre farm in Santa Cruz, California, Kristine has become a sought-after expert, particularly in creating colours and forms that captivate both exhibitors and florists.

Episode Summary

  • Kristine’s Journey: How Kristine turned a quarter-acre plot into a dahlia haven.
  • Hybridising Dahlias: The art and science of creating new dahlia varieties, including Kristine’s techniques and goals.
  • The Dahlias Genome Project: Kristine's role in an ambitious project to decode the genetic blueprint of dahlias.
  • Challenges of Flower Farming: Insights on managing viruses, cross-pollination techniques, and more.
  • Innovations and Inspirations: Kristine’s ongoing quest for unique dahlia colours like brown and Coco Loco-inspired shades.

Key Takeaways

  1. The Art of Hybridisation
    Kristine details the hybridisation process, including hand-pollination techniques and how to create new, vibrant varieties. Hybridisers can start by letting dahlias naturally cross-pollinate or manually selecting pollen sources to reach specific goals.
  2. Building Florist-Friendly Varieties
    Kristine emphasises breeding dahlias for florists with versatile colours like blush and antique tones, meeting the demand for trendy, event-worthy flowers.
  3. Navigating Challenges in Farming
    Handling dahlia viruses and preserving healthy stock for clients are major challenges. Kristine shares her methods, from sterilising tools to testing for virus-free plants.
  4. Community and Collaboration
    By working with licensed sellers to multiply and distribute her varieties, Kristine sustains her business. She also collaborates closely with florists for feedback on new Dahlia traits that resonate with designers.

Resources

  • Follow Kristine on Instagram: @SantaCruzDahlias
  • Books by Kristine Albrecht: Available on Amazon
    • Dahlia Breeding for the Farmer, Florist, and Home Gardener
    • Dahlias: Seed to Bloom

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[00:00:00] Roz Chandler: I'm delighted to welcome Kristine Albrecht to the podcast today. In 2006, Kristine reclaimed an urban quarter of an acre, so we'll hear more about that, in Santa Cruz, California, that was full of weeds and fallow for many years. She fed the soil and eventually planted over 1, 800 dahlias.

[00:00:20] Roz Chandler: Kristine's passion has been hybridizing, can't wait to hear about that, new Dahlia varieties. She develops varieties for both Exhibition and Cut Flowers and all of her varieties start with the initial K A. That obviously stands for her name. In addition to being an award winning Dahlia exhibitor, Kristine is a cut flower farmer working with florists and designers.

[00:00:42] Roz Chandler: She also has an active Instagram account and you can follow her at Santa Cruz Dahlias. And Kristine is Vice President of the Monterey Bay Dahlias Society, done that for many years now, and is currently leading the Dahlias Genome Project for the American Dahlias Society. I don't know where you'd find time for all of this, honestly.

[00:01:00] Roz Chandler: Kristine has won the American Dahlias Society's Darrell Hart Award for many of her varieties. Wow. SKristineine, do tell us about your journey. How did you find yourself with an urban plot of land and growing dahlias? Where did it all start? 

[00:01:17] Kristine Albrecht: It all started when my, I have two, two grown children now, but when they were in like junior high, they were like, Mom, we don't really need you that much anymore.

[00:01:26] Kristine Albrecht: You might, and then so I thought I better start, Figuring out what I want to do, and I've always enjoyed growing vegetables and at the time, we had a bed and breakfast, and so my husband said, it'd be great to have flowers in the room. Why don't you grow some flowers?

[00:01:41] Kristine Albrecht: And because he knew I could grow veggies pretty well, and and my son and I have been growing giant pumpkins too, so we knew how to grow them. We grew a 780 pound pumpkin for our county fair. And we did that for about seven years and actually that's where I learned how to do hybridizing because the giant pumpkin community is all about crossing like the best giant with the other best giant, and you would cover up your female flowers and male flowers and, cross the pollen and all that.

[00:02:10] Kristine Albrecht: So I had some experience with hybridizing with that, but We got the bed and breakfast, my husband was running it and I wanted to do, and he wanted me to do flowers for it. So I think the first year I tried zinnias and I'm like I don't know about zinnias. And then a friend gave me some Dahlia tubers from a box store here in Santa Cruz and said, you know what, you should try growing dahlias.

[00:02:32] Kristine Albrecht: You probably would really love them. She was growing them. She really liked them. And so I. Set off with about 20 dahlias to start with just here at my house on my side yard. And I really enjoyed that first year. I'm like, these are beautiful. I want to grow more. And I'm the kind of person that when I jump into something, I jump in more than 100 percent.

[00:02:55] Kristine Albrecht: And we have this quarter acre that was behind some rentals that we had. And It was super fallow it had weeds, it had dead trees in it half the property was covered in. blackberries. And so I said, wow, this will be a good project for me. I need to put my energy somewhere because my kids didn't really need me too much anymore.

[00:03:16] Kristine Albrecht: And so that's where it started. So I started at my house and I actually still do grow about 300 dahlias here at my house. I changed my front yard. It used to have a lawn and now it's, now it has dahlias most of the time. And then at the farm, I grow about a couple thousand dahlias at the farm on that quarter acre.

[00:03:35] Kristine Albrecht: So that's where it started. And the guests really enjoyed the flowers in the room, and I was having fun, and my husband just loved having those flowers in the room. So that's where I started my journey, my Dahlia journey. 

[00:03:50] Roz Chandler: What about hybridization? Because that sounds I've never done it.

[00:03:55] Roz Chandler: I would love to do it and I'd certainly like to have something named after me. That's probably lovely. But I imagine that it's quite difficult. I've, followed a few flower farmers in the States and there's some hybridization of zinnias and all sorts and having to isolate them and cover them and move them.

[00:04:10] Roz Chandler: How do you I mean What is hybridization and how do you do it? 

[00:04:15] Kristine Albrecht: Yeah, so if you think of dahlias today, most of us get tubers and grow from tubers, but all those plants that you see like cafe au lait or any of your favorite dahlias actually all started from a seed. That's how And then we tend to then the first year we plant that seed, it grows into a full plant, and then it also gives us tubers that first year.

[00:04:38] Kristine Albrecht: So then people tend to propagate those tubers, give them to friends, sell them. And that's how dahlias basically get out into the world. But there are lots of ways to hybridize dahlias and a lot simpler than what you were saying. Yes like I hand pollinate and that's That's a more complicated and time consuming process, but I think the easiest process for people to do if you have dahlias in your patch you could just let some of the blooms basically open their centers.

[00:05:07] Kristine Albrecht: So you just leave the bloom on your plant. It will open up and you'll, it'll pop its center and inside there you'll see pollen and that's the seed producing center of a dahlia bloom. So all of us have the potential if we grow dahlias to make, to collect seed basically. So all you could do is you want to leave that bloom on the plant for about six weeks.

[00:05:29] Kristine Albrecht: And that's how long it takes from once the bee pollinates the stigma and the seeds start to form, you need about six weeks on the plant. So the plant gives its nutrients it allows the seed to grow. It starts out really small, teeny tiny, and then grows to about anywhere from about a third of an inch to a half an inch at most And the seeds look like zinnias seeds.

[00:05:52] Kristine Albrecht: They're flat and papery. So that's a really good way for people to start out just seeing if they enjoy the process of seed collecting. So it would be collecting seed from the Dahlia. So you could just collect that seed. It makes a little seed head that looks like an acorn. It's pointed.

[00:06:08] Kristine Albrecht: It looks different than say a bud that would be forming a flower on your dahlia and it's pointed. It usually has a dark top on it. The center turns dark once it gets mature. You break those off and immediately you can open it up and Basically, harvest the seed from the seed head. You dry it out for a few days.

[00:06:27] Kristine Albrecht: I do it on paper just in my kitchen, and then I put it into like a paper envelope to store in a cool place for the winter. So basically then in the spring you would sprout those seeds and they would have the potential to grow into a full plant and give you tubers by the end of the season.

[00:06:49] Kristine Albrecht: So it's a pretty exciting process and it's, a lot of people have jumped into hybridizing and in that way it's really easy if you just basically collect the seeds from your plants. There are about nine strategies for, for collecting or for hybridizing dahlias. You can, and we've written a book, so it makes it easy if you want to go to the book and see all the nine strategies that people can use.

[00:07:16] Kristine Albrecht: But I would say the simplest one is to just collect seed as you see them forming on your dahlia plant. 

[00:07:24] Roz Chandler: And so it grows into a tuba in the first year. Presumably it's not acting very much as a cut flower in its first year. No, it does. No, it does. Oh, yeah, I've seen to cut flower in one year. Oh, yeah.

[00:07:36] Kristine Albrecht: Lots of cut flowers. If it's a variety that's going to be floriferous and give you lots of blooms that will do that in the first year. 

[00:07:45] Roz Chandler: Wow. Yeah, it's worth playing with it. 

[00:07:48] Kristine Albrecht: Yeah. Yeah. We start about a thousand dahlia seeds a year. We do cut those for our we have about six florists and designers that we work with on our farm.

[00:07:59] Kristine Albrecht: So we cut them tubs of flowers. They usually want like mixed Tubs. And so we definitely do add in some of those first year seedling blooms. The thing with hybridizing, people might say, oh, I'm going to do it. I'm going to get all great varieties from, all these seeds I planted.

[00:08:15] Kristine Albrecht: The thing is, most of the time of the thousand dahlia seeds I plant really I will only introduce about five of those that are hybridized. come from those thousands. There's a lot of culling or throwing out. Basically dahlias tend to want to hearken back to their beginnings. And the species dahlias, the dahlias that are grown, that are, that grow in the wild in Mexico, actually look like a cosmos, and they're very small.

[00:08:40] Kristine Albrecht: They're about an inch and a half. They're on these long weak stems that are downward facing. And that's where dahlias began were from those species dahlias. The Europeans came over, brought them back to Europe and then started hybridizing. And hybridizing towards the fully doubled or the multi petaled, the full petals that we see today on dahlias.

[00:09:01] Kristine Albrecht: So they they. Basically would see a single that had more than eight pedals. They would cross it with another one that had more than eight pedals. And pretty soon they would build that pedal count until you tell, till they built it to what we have today. And so we, as hybridizers are basically building on that history going hundreds of years back from all the hybridizers prior to us.

[00:09:23] Kristine Albrecht: And it's exciting to think that even what I'm doing was built from many generations ago. 

[00:09:29] Roz Chandler: Yeah, and we'll continue to go much longer than you, which is all, which is quite amazing. So how, so you hybrid, you do some hand pollination as well, do you say?

[00:09:40] Kristine Albrecht: Yeah what I like to do is I have set hybridizing goals for the year. So it might be a color, like I'm trying for a brown and a lime doll right now, . And kinda like Coco Loco the Rose, I'm not sure if you're. familiar with that one, but a brownie pink. I would love to have a dahlia that color.

[00:09:57] Kristine Albrecht: I think it would look beautiful with people's skins for weddings and things like that. So yeah, so I'm hybridizing. I said hybridizing goals and with hand pollination, you can push your varieties towards that goal a little faster because I am choosing the pollen that the two get chosen.

[00:10:14] Kristine Albrecht: So if I have a seed parent here and a pollen parent here, I take the pollen from this one and put it onto this one. And before that, they're covered in organza bags. Both of them are covered in organza bags. I wait for pollen to be showing here and the center to be open here. And then I will take the pollen from this and put it on that and cover it up again and wait for the seeds to form.

[00:10:36] Kristine Albrecht: So I can spend anywhere from two to three hours a day doing that. And my farm now. Basically is all geared around hybridizing. So my quarter acre has not, has almost a hundred percent. I do bring in other varieties for bringing in new genetics for my hybridizing program.

[00:10:53] Kristine Albrecht: So my quarter acre is all set for hybridizing. So I have the thousand or more first year seedlings and I've got my second year seedlings. So the first years go to second year, the ones that I like. Typically like. The thousand go to 50. I pick 50 out of those thousand that I like that meet my hybridizing goals that I like for whatever reason, or I want to use for hybridizing.

[00:11:14] Kristine Albrecht: And then the third year I grow those out in bigger numbers like The second year, I might grow three of each of the first years. So then the second year, there's three, and then the third, fourth, and fifth, I will grow out 10 to 15 of each. And just to really see what they'll do, what their tuber production is, whether all the traits I was hoping for are good, make sure they have good strong stems, that they produce a lot of blooms for florists and designers to use or for show.

[00:11:45] Kristine Albrecht: And so That's how my farm is set up and actually the 300 that I grow up my house is also set up all for hybridizing. So with hand pollination, you've got them covered, and then the next year I'll grow those seeds out. So that's a More time consuming process, definitely.

[00:12:02] Kristine Albrecht: And I don't know that most people have time to do that. There aren't really very many people hand pollinating. I would say the majority of hybridizers here in the US are doing it with open pollination. And then there's another one called open pollination with culling. And I think a fair amount of the hybridizers do that too.

[00:12:22] Kristine Albrecht: Where they. They limit the pollen that the bees can go and take by either A, not growing certain varieties in their patch to begin with. For example, if you grow singles, so I don't know if you know what a single dahlia looks like. It has an open center. It has 8 petals. So the other kind of open center varieties would be, like orchids anemones.

[00:12:46] Kristine Albrecht: Those are all considered open centered, where the bees can visit them a zillion times easier than they can crawl into a really a fully peddled, formal decorative where the centers are really tight and difficult to get into. So what happens is bees want to visit that one. They're like, hey, let's go over to there because it's so much easier to collect pollen and not go to your fully doubled.

[00:13:08] Kristine Albrecht: So what will happen is when you collect your seed and this happened to me for two years I collected the seed and All of them were either singles or really poor for fully doubled, which like maybe one to two rows of petals. It's a good idea if you're going to hybridize and if you don't want just singles, if you love singles, just go for it.

[00:13:31] Kristine Albrecht: The bees will help you and they'll give you tons of them. But if you want fully doubled, you're going to really need to either eliminate those out of your patch. Or do hand pollinating. You can have whatever you want in your patch when you're hand pollinating because you're basically covering the ones that you want to hybridize with those organ organza bags.

[00:13:48] Kristine Albrecht: And that's basically what the Zia people do when they have those isolation tents. So basically you're making little isolation tents on your dahlias. 

[00:13:58] Roz Chandler: It's like choosing your favorite child, isn't it? It's . It's, that's what I want it to be strong. I want it to be. That Coco Loco color, I want it to like a gray lilac to me, but it's very popular for absolute certainty.

[00:14:11] Roz Chandler: I don't think we can make a blue day, yeah? Because there isn't such a thing. I think everybody's, I think people, I think it doesn't exist and will never exist. No. And it's, yeah, it's interesting that you can make Something that you love. What's been your favorite that you've ever done? 

[00:14:25] Kristine Albrecht: I'm, my favorites are always like the next ones I'm going to grow.

[00:14:28] Kristine Albrecht: But cause I'm super excited. I've already collected my seed for this year and cleaned it and have it all organized. And I'm super excited about growing because I did these special hand crosses and I'm really curious to see what they've come out with. But I think today, my favorite is Kay's Cinder Rose.

[00:14:46] Kristine Albrecht: I'm not sure if you're familiar with that one, but it's got an unusual kind of Pinky, mauve y color, and the backs of the petals are a really pale orange. It has great puts out a lot of blooms. The florists just love it, and it, because it's one of those blenders. So part of the thing that I've been working on in my hybridizing program is To develop varieties that the florists and designers are really interested in because in the past what's happened is most of the hybridizing has been coming from the American Dahlia Society or the what's your big society called in the UK?

[00:15:26] Roz Chandler: Oh, it's what the Dahlia Society, the National Dahlia Society. Yeah, 

[00:15:30] Kristine Albrecht: so they, so you probably know, like I know, like with the American Dahlia Society, there are really strict rules and parameters around all those blooms. And one of the parameters that in the American Dahlia Society, and I'm sure probably sure in yours as well, is that color has to be pure.

[00:15:47] Kristine Albrecht: And what they, how they define pure is there it's not really a combination of any colors. There's no There's no gray in there. There's no other colors that might blend. There's no blending in it. There's no sort of antique colors that might have that kind of dusty look to them. It doesn't they don't consider that like a good Dahlia, if it has color like that.

[00:16:10] Kristine Albrecht: And what I am looking for in my hybridizing program, I do like to hybridize for the American Dahlia Society. I I'm, I love growing giant dahlias and those are things that the florescent designers are not that interested. In my case, Kalisi grows to over 12 inches and it just won the Johnson award in the American Dahlia Society, which is the top Bloom in the country that is in competition and won the most blues or higher in ADS.

[00:16:40] Kristine Albrecht: It's one of the top awards in our American Dahlia Society. But anyway so I'm really concentrating on looking at and hybridizing colors that the florists and designers would like to use. That kind of hadn't been happening that much prior to that. There were before that, tons of beautiful dahlias that that florists and designers use.

[00:17:01] Kristine Albrecht: But what I think my varieties are doing is bringing a little bit of that, those blending colors more of those antique colors, a little bit more of the matted colors, the things that work really well for weddings and so it's been really fun hybridizing for that and thinking about that when I do my hand crossing oh, I wonder what these 2 would do, these parents.

[00:17:24] Kristine Albrecht: And then I also keep track of everything on a spreadsheet so that I know oh, I crossed those 2 last year. I got 60 seed from it. Wow, all 60 were terrible, or all 60 were like really good. So maybe I should do that cross again this year and try to see if I can get even better than that. But if everything is coming out poorly from that cross, especially if I've been able to grow out like 60 of that cross, I get a sense that's not one I want to keep spending my time doing.

[00:17:54] Kristine Albrecht: Yeah, that's Yeah, so it's pretty fun, playing around with those and trying to figure things out and trying to push things in the direction that I'm hoping for. I've been working on a brown Dahlia for probably 5 years now and haven't gotten brown, but I'm pushing it. It's getting a little closer.

[00:18:10] Kristine Albrecht: I have a bronzy color now. That's good. Yeah, so it's hard to know dahlias are, they're thinking now that dahlias, they thought they were octoploids, which means they have four sets of chromosomes from both the pollen and then four from the seed parent. But now they're thinking the American Dahlia Society is doing the genome project and we just sequenced the dahlia.

[00:18:31] Kristine Albrecht: And after doing all that work, they are finding out they think it's a tetraploid now. So it has three sets. And three sets instead of four and four. Still a lot of, still a lot of genetic material for us. We are deployed, so we only have one from our mother and one from our father. 

[00:18:48] Roz Chandler: Say the data is more complicated.

[00:18:50] Roz Chandler: It's more 

[00:18:50] Kristine Albrecht: complicated, and so that makes. Yeah, and that's what makes, what we love in varieties is, in dahlias is how much variety and diversity they have. So they have a lot of diversity. There are 29 different forms. Most flowers don't have that many, petal shapes basically as a form.

[00:19:08] Kristine Albrecht: And size too. Dahlias run from, one inch up to 16 inches. 

[00:19:13] Roz Chandler: Yeah. Yeah. I can't remember how many varieties there are in the world. Oh. Are increasing massively. But it was something like 44, 000 or something really mad. It was mad. It was just like really well developed. And I think that's the interest.

[00:19:28] Roz Chandler: I think you've got also, I suppose with florists and stylists and certainly weddings, it's very trendable. It's very like in the UK this year, it was very apricot, peach with a splash of burgundy, really. It was a dark pop of something. And that was, 2024. And you've already got to decide when you're planting now for 2025 what you think the trend is going to be.

[00:19:52] Roz Chandler: So you look at the Pantone colour of the year and you look at interior design and you think what's people going for. Generally of course there's still lots of peaches and pastels and lots of greens and whites. But there is a pop of colour I think, it's quite interesting. Yeah, and I 

[00:20:06] Kristine Albrecht: think it's challenging for hybridizers because we aren't just planting for the next year.

[00:20:11] Kristine Albrecht: We have to think four years ahead, like what might be popular four years from now? So it's even with hybridizing do we need some like lavender dahlias? Do we need more lavender? Do we need more purple? It's not a very popular color here right now, but 

[00:20:26] Roz Chandler: who knows?

[00:20:26] Roz Chandler: A lot of people. We found, some people like a pop of color that's quite dark, it's almost like a black cosmos, and it's like just really dark. And I found that with tulips, they want to go black. So it's because it's quite unusual, but it, I don't know, it's a hybridization because you say you're not doing the next year, you're doing the next five years or longer.

[00:20:46] Roz Chandler: Yeah. It's Ooh, I'd quite to see a brown one though, I would like to see 

[00:20:51] Kristine Albrecht: Yeah, and I have this one that's really dark purple. I'm calling it K is dark plum for now. And I just love the color and the designers do too, but it's not what's challenging with hybridizing too is sometimes you'll get the right color, but the, but there are lots of traits that need to fall into place for you to actually introduce that one.

[00:21:12] Kristine Albrecht: So if it has like a weak stem yeah. Florists and designers can't use that or show flowers or if the bloom itself is downward facing that's a non starter, right? Or if it pops its center immediately, and then there's pollen everywhere, that bloom will go down fast, and it won't have a good base life.

[00:21:32] Kristine Albrecht: There are things that you're working with and then also dahlias have virus too. So then as a hybridizer, I'm trying to keep virus out of my patch. And so there's challenges all along the way. Yesterday I was dividing my first year seedlings. So I grow those all in four inch pots and they sink, I sink them into the ground so that their tuber is really tiny.

[00:21:53] Kristine Albrecht: It's been forced to grow small. It still has everything it needs to grow a full plant. There are little tiny tubers in there. If I hadn't grown in at a pot, the tubers probably would have been long and thin and stretched out and much bigger. But yesterday I was taking my first year seedlings in those four inch pots and I was dividing them.

[00:22:12] Kristine Albrecht: And one of the I loved last year. I pop it out of the 4 inch pot and the tubers are not there or not usable. So then basically, as a hybridizer, I'm like, oh, shoot, I just lost that variety, and so you have to really get, be okay with With what? You've 

[00:22:31] Roz Chandler: got to be alright with failure, because 

[00:22:33] Kristine Albrecht: that's distilled 

[00:22:33] Roz Chandler: land.

[00:22:34] Kristine Albrecht: Yeah, that's part of it. And so what I try to do is not get too attached to them, because, I really, I can start to get attached like year three, but before that, there are stumbles along the road. If the tubers don't store well, or the next year it doesn't grow well.

[00:22:50] Kristine Albrecht: You can also just lose. Your first years or second years to like gophers. I don't know if you guys have gophers, but 

[00:22:57] Roz Chandler: we don't have gophers, but we have lots of similar things. Yeah. 

[00:22:59] Kristine Albrecht: Yeah. So they could, with a first year seedling, you literally have one clump. You can't go to your friend and say, Hey, do you have Valley porcupine?

[00:23:08] Kristine Albrecht: Cause it got eaten by a gopher. You have to just, say, oh, that's too bad. I lost that one, so there, so as a hybridizer it's frustrating. Sometimes when you lose 1, we just have to let go surrender to the process. 

[00:23:23] Roz Chandler: Yeah, I suppose as flower growers, maybe we're used to failure, but it is quite hard.

[00:23:28] Roz Chandler: Yeah, I long to hybridize and so many years to get it to a point. 

[00:23:33] Kristine Albrecht: Yeah, my sister, I'm really lucky because my sister in law was a hybridizer of lots of different flowers for many years, like 40 years. And I will be able to call her up, which is really great and say, Hey, Janet, what's, I'm doing this.

[00:23:47] Kristine Albrecht: I'm this is happening. Do you have any suggestions? And, sometimes she'll just come back to me and say, Kristine, it's agriculture. That's what happens. So that's. That's what, so that's what is a saying around our house if something fails or doesn't make it, we just say, oh, that's agriculture.

[00:24:05] Kristine Albrecht: Yeah, 

[00:24:06] Roz Chandler: and you, and how do you sell them then? How do you get these tubers out in the market? 

[00:24:11] Kristine Albrecht: Yeah, so for me a lot of hybridizers have lots of property they might have 20 acres or acres of property, but here in Santa Cruz, I have my front yard, which is probably 50 by. I don't know.

[00:24:26] Kristine Albrecht: 20, and then I have a quarter of an acre on another piece of property. So that's not a lot of property because all of that is being used now for my hybridizing for all those different stages of hybridizing. And so what I've done is I'm working with, license sellers, so our work is trademarked now.

[00:24:45] Kristine Albrecht: And so we have licensed sellers that basically take my varieties and multiply them and then sell them. And then I get a royalty back once a year from the sales on that. But I have two sellers that introduce my new introductions. So Stonehouse Dahlias in the U. S. and Microflower Farm in the U.

[00:25:05] Kristine Albrecht: S. So Stonehouse takes my varieties and multiplies them and sells rooted cuttings. And then Microflower Farm does tubers. So those are for the new introductions. So we have five new introductions from Stonehouse and about five from From a micro flower farm this year. So we might have to 10 new varieties of mine coming out this year, which is a lot.

[00:25:27] Kristine Albrecht: Usually we don't have that many in 1 year. We usually have about 5, but but with tubers with tuber seller you have to take multiple years to build your stock. Because if you think about it, you have to save some for yourself so that you can grow them again the next year. And if you want to sell them, you have to save quite a few.

[00:25:44] Kristine Albrecht: And then if you sell off your whole stock, you won't be able to sell it the next year. But with with with cuttings, they can make a lot of cuttings. So that works out well for everyone. But most of the people selling my varieties are selling through, with tubers.

[00:25:58] Kristine Albrecht: And so for a hybridizer like myself with all the expenses of my farm and basically putting everything into hybridizing, I really need to get income to offset the expenses of my farm. And so having licensed sellers is a real, is a good way for me to do that.

[00:26:15] Roz Chandler: Yeah. Gosh. So tell us about your book.

[00:26:20] Roz Chandler: You mentioned the book. Tell us a bit more about the book. 

[00:26:22] Kristine Albrecht: Yeah so basically we have two books that we've written. So the first book that we wrote is called Dahlia Breeding for the Farmer, Florist, and the Home Gardener. And it's a really a step by step way to learn how to hybridize dahlias.

[00:26:36] Kristine Albrecht: And so if you're interested in it, it's a great book. It's it's about 20 U. S. dollars to buy it. It's on Amazon and we wrote that in 2020. Like during the pandemic we had no Dahlia shows everybody was locked down. And there wasn't a book on exactly how to hybridize Dahlias.

[00:26:54] Kristine Albrecht: And so I said, okay, I think we can do this. My husband is a great writer and I have the information. So we were a really good team. And then we teamed up again in 2023. And we wrote Dahlia's Seed to Bloom. And that is basically a handbook on how to grow dahlias. It takes you from, how to build your soil to everything you can think of from dividing I could make a list.

[00:27:19] Kristine Albrecht: I could tell you a list. There's a huge long list of multiple chapters. There's watering options, pre sprouting tubers just. Pinching out young plants, fertilizing dahlias, disbudding and deadheading, growing in hot climates, we actually included About nine other growers across the country in in the UK Philippa Stewart is one of the contributors and she did some really great information in there about growing in England but we have Belgium England, Washington here, Australia, Canada.

[00:27:50] Kristine Albrecht: Mexico, New Zealand. So we included in that book, other growers that had different kind of challenges to their environments like Mexico. It's pretty unforgiving climate there. It's a little hotter. They get lots of wind, they get a lot of rain. And then Heather Henson of Boreal Blooms, she's in Alberta, Canada, which is Way the heck up there, and it's super cold.

[00:28:13] Kristine Albrecht: She has a really short season, but she does it, and she shares it 

[00:28:17] Roz Chandler: with her dahlias, presumably, and it's just to lift them all. 

[00:28:21] Kristine Albrecht: Yeah, she doesn't. She only lifts the ones that she wants to continue for the next year, and because her soil is so cold, it freezes and kills the dahlia tubers off, all the ones she doesn't want.

[00:28:32] Kristine Albrecht: She doesn't have to. Yeah. If I did that here, like I left in the ones I didn't like, they would just resprout and grow the next year. Yeah. 

[00:28:40] Roz Chandler: And probably 

[00:28:40] Kristine Albrecht: wear 

[00:28:40] Roz Chandler: with you too, right? I've got the same thing. Yeah. I'm well drained soil in the middle of England. I don't lift my daily years, I leave them unless I wanna propagate from them.

[00:28:49] Roz Chandler: I leave them in the ground and they come back the next year. As long as I've mulched them, covered them, stored them, haven't, and unless we get really, in fact, even when we had extreme to minus 10, we still did. It's not wet enough. It wasn't wet enough. So it was fine. But yeah, I can imagine that.

[00:29:03] Roz Chandler: And then UK, they do have to lift them, but I'm lucky and I don't, because it's a big 

[00:29:09] Kristine Albrecht: job. So your soil doesn't completely freeze even in your coldest, so she has to deal with that. Then there's Laura Lee Merton in in Australia. She has really windy conditions to work with. And so she's she, Talked about her challenges Galena, I don't know if Galena at Micro Flower Farm, but her challenges at the time, she's actually moved to a larger area now, but she had a small area she was growing in.

[00:29:34] Kristine Albrecht: And so she would have everything packed in there, but she that was a challenge for her, but she shares her challenges with that. And then David Hall of Halstead, Hedden, is it Hedden or Heaton? Heddon. Heddon. Yeah he talks about how he makes his cuttings, which is super interesting.

[00:29:52] Kristine Albrecht: I loved interviewing him for the book. He's just full of amazing knowledge and how many cuttings he ships to across all of the, of England. It's incredible. Pretty amazing. And he uses like moss and stuff like that for his for his padding and keeping the cuttings looking really nice.

[00:30:10] Kristine Albrecht: It's such, it's just so nice to hear someone using something so natural too. Yes. Because most everything's plastic. And then Filippa does amazing work with all her drawing of her dahlias. I 

[00:30:23] Roz Chandler: know. I know because I've tried drying dahlias and some obviously the smaller ones will dry much easier, but it's not an easy, they're very delicate.

[00:30:31] Roz Chandler: They don't dry that well. They're not the best plant to dry. And she does amazing with that. 

[00:30:36] Kristine Albrecht: Yeah. And she said she gets more for her dry than for her fresh dahlias and she can sell them year round. It's something I think for flower farmers to think about. And then we have Melissa Smith of Fralick Farm in there.

[00:30:49] Kristine Albrecht: She's in, in South Carolina and it's super hot there. So she has really challenges. She will sometimes start her dahlias super early, cut them back during her hard, hard, Hottest time, so maybe get an early flush, then cut them back when it's super hot and the pests are really bad, and then wait till the fall when it cools down, then she gets the second flush from them.

[00:31:11] Kristine Albrecht: She's done that, or she's also learned if she doesn't want to work hard with the first and second flush, She just plants her dahlias later to just go for that second flush. There's so much we could learn from people growing in, in lots of different climates. And then we did also interview Dr.

[00:31:28] Kristine Albrecht: Keith Hammett in New Zealand. I don't know if you're familiar with him. He does a lot of hybridizing of dark foliage dahlias and dahlias that are singles but have this almost, they call it black, but it's, I would say it's super dark green. And what's really fun for us here at, in Santa Cruz at our local garden center San Lorenzo Garden Center Keith's work is there.

[00:31:52] Kristine Albrecht: All the way from New Zealand, so he must have a supplier. I don't know all his ins and outs, but he has the supplier that multiplies his varieties and then gets them out into the world, across the world it's pretty fun having that book and having all those contributors in it that that really have helped the book.

[00:32:12] Kristine Albrecht: I think Lends like some expertise for people and more confident, confidence for people who are growing in kind of challenging climates. 

[00:32:21] Kristine Albrecht: Yeah. So that's been, that was fun growing those, doing those two books and it's nice Amazon we just self publish through Amazon and they do a good job.

[00:32:31] Kristine Albrecht: They collect the money. They send everything out. If there's any issues, they deal with that. And so for us it's really a plus. We, if we did it ourselves, we would be shipping books probably every day because we do sell, a few books every day for sure. It

[00:32:44] Roz Chandler: looks like it makes it more global.

[00:32:45] Roz Chandler: I, on Amazon, I self publish too. I'm going for my one, two, three, fourth book now. Oh, okay. And and I love it. I love it. You do this and they handle it. And then actually what they're doing is bringing in a new customer to your world anyway. And they're doing the marketing for you. And obviously the royalties aren't as big as if you were doing it yourself and all those things, but you can ship it almost anywhere.

[00:33:04] Roz Chandler: I do planners, which means You can't ship them everywhere in the world, but you do get a big audience. I've got a big audience in the US, I've got a big audience in Canada, and Yeah, it's the way to go. And it opens up writing for everybody, really, doesn't it? 

[00:33:18] Kristine Albrecht: Yeah. No, it's been really good for us. And, as a farmer, you're so busy, I wouldn't have time to take on shipping and dealing with customer issues and all that and collecting money.

[00:33:31] Kristine Albrecht: And I don't know, it's, it does make it simple and then you get the information out. So that's a plus. 

[00:33:38] Roz Chandler: Yeah. I agree. Tell us your greatest challenge in running your business. What's been your greatest highs and lows in your business? 

[00:33:44] Roz Chandler: Besides the fact of failure, I'd want to cry at that 

[00:33:48] Kristine Albrecht: point, but yeah I think there's some of the challenges and are for me right now is I'm 66 years old and I'm not 30 anymore.

[00:33:59] Kristine Albrecht: And I did, I realized Now with my farm, I need to bring in more help. I can't, lug 50 pound things all over the place and do this and that. So I think it makes it more challenging to run a business as you get a little bit older, you need more help. Also the thing that's challenging for us is for us to get virus free stock to our, Like Stonehouse has to, we have to get virus free stock to them.

[00:34:23] Kristine Albrecht: So there's a lot of testing. We have to be really careful in our field when we're cutting. We have a 10 to 20 percent bleach solution in a specialty pack on our right hand side. All our clips go into bleach. So between each cut, we have to dip and that's so that we're not spreading the virus to say, our 1st year seedlings that need to be clean or, And the second things, Dahlia virus out there in the general public is 80, like 87%.

[00:34:52] Kristine Albrecht: So there's a lot of Dahlia virus, and there's no way to get around it. But when you're a hybridizer, like I am, you can't be getting to Stonehouse who's making cuttings like virus stock to begin with, because it just shows up super quickly. The plants don't grow that well. So I'd say that's been a challenge for me.

[00:35:13] Kristine Albrecht: Yeah, and getting older learning the business, I think, was, is a challenge too. When I first started growing dahlias, I was doing it as a hobby. I had my other. My, my day job the farm could lose money. I would subsidize it with. what I was doing, and I feel like it took us a long time, like maybe 15 years to really figure it out.

[00:35:34] Kristine Albrecht: And part of it was I wasn't working hard at the business end of it because I could supplement it with my day job. But I'd say those are the the sort of challenges that I'm facing now at my farm and maybe in the past too. But the things that I really that really bring me a lot of joy is I just love hybridizing.

[00:35:56] Kristine Albrecht: I just love crossing things. I love seeing what the, what I can get from my crosses and that's what kind of keeps me going day after day is doing that. It's, you wake up with seedlings and something new has just bloomed that's, one's not out there in the world. It's like Christmas, it's or your birthday or something, you get these little gifts like every day.

[00:36:18] Kristine Albrecht: Because it might take two months for all your seedlings to open up. I usually run out into my first year seedling patch, my PJs in the morning, so that I can, see right away what's going on out there. And that's, that, that part is really good. I don't know if I answered your question, but, 

[00:36:34] Roz Chandler: It's true actually.

[00:36:35] Roz Chandler: I'm 61. So it's the same thing. And I have to employ more people and I've been running the flower farm for 15 years and it was a transition from a corporate role and all of those. So in the early days, it doesn't really matter. You're a hobby and it's quite plain and you can supplement. But fairly soon you realize actually it's not a hobby anymore.

[00:36:50] Roz Chandler: And this has become bigger and you're employing people. And this is now a serious growing up business. And, oh my goodness. And now I have to be good at everything. I have to be good at accounts. I have to be good at social media. I have to be good online. I have to run, I do run courses because that can't happen in COVID.

[00:37:04] Roz Chandler: I write books, I've got planners, it's all sorts of revenue streams. Because as a flower farmer, it's tough when you've just, you have got to have a business plan and you have got to have a strategy and you've got to run it like a serious grown up business. And I think that's when you wake up one day and think this is going to be serious or not serious really.

[00:37:21] Roz Chandler: It's either a hobby or it's not. So I think that same in the same as you, I'm 61 and therefore physically, you I'm not about humping loads of compost around anymore. I'm not about, digging. I've got new beds to dig for tulips. And yeah, I'm just not 30 anymore. I'm 61. And I think you have to understand that and make strategic decisions about how, who you hire, what you do and how you run it.

[00:37:43] Roz Chandler: And I have quite a big workforce here on the farm now. Because it only allows me to do other stuff. And it's great. And so I don't get involved too much in physical anymore enough. I can dabble, which is always the thing you can do as a flower farmer. You have to be everything. Don't you have to be a marketer, a social media whiz, an accountant.

[00:38:02] Roz Chandler: You've got to be really good with the numbers. You've got to be a grower. You've got to love some spreadsheets. You've got to analyze all your germination rates and your growth rates and how much you're getting out of those every square meter. And you, like any business, you've got to know, and I think the flower farmers are hardest actually, because you're basically putting it all in the soil.

[00:38:18] Roz Chandler: You're investing massively. You have no idea what you're going to get. You have no idea how much you're going to get. And you don't actually, at that point, know who you're going to sell to. And I can't think there's any other business in the world. That we would go so blindfolded into investing heavily up front without actually knowing what we're going to do.

[00:38:36] Kristine Albrecht: So 

[00:38:38] Roz Chandler: it's mad, really, in a way. It's mad. And nature can come along and ruin it all for us. I know. 

[00:38:44] Kristine Albrecht: And that's agriculture, right? Yeah, that's agriculture. 

[00:38:49] Roz Chandler: Okay. Yeah. And so you've got to be prepared for that as well. Yeah, if you get ghoul dahlias, you're wiped out. For a while. And if your tulips get eaten by squirrels, you're wiped out.

[00:38:59] Roz Chandler: There's 30, 000 tulips you planted, which I'm doing now, get eaten by squirrels. I've had it. So it's okay. And it's agriculture. Yeah. 

[00:39:09] Kristine Albrecht: I think I'm lucky because I don't enjoy the counting part that much of my farm. I keep track of all my receipts and all that, but my husband likes doing that.

[00:39:18] Kristine Albrecht: So I just put it on his desk and then he has all these nice spreadsheets and everything. Thank you, Brian, for doing all that for me, because that's the part I don't like. The social media I enjoy, I love growing things. So that's fun. And for me and this customer service, we have really great florists and designers in our town that I've been.

[00:39:39] Kristine Albrecht: Working with one of our florists for over 15 years, they've been buying my dahlias. And what I love about them is I have them come and pick up at my farm because they're all within 10 minutes of the farm because my farm is in the middle of suburbia. Literally, people can't believe it. Like what? There's a quarter acre farm in here?

[00:39:58] Kristine Albrecht: These properties used to be old chicken farms. They were pretty big. Plots of land, considering like most suburban lots here in our town are like 50 by 150, feet. They're very small. Yeah, to have a quarter acre is unusual in the middle of a city.

[00:40:16] Kristine Albrecht: Santa Cruz is a city, but they, my florists come to my farm and pick up once or twice a week there. And so I can say to them, Hey, Katie, will you come walk through my first year seedlings here and tell me I'm liking this one. Is this one that you think you could use? Or, and she'll go, this is the one here.

[00:40:33] Kristine Albrecht: And I go, really? Really? This one? She goes, Oh, yeah, there's no colors out there that are like that. There, we need those blending colors. We need that color. There's no, no other colors I can buy that look like that. So they really helped me out. All my florists and designers, the six that I work with, they get to walk through the patch.

[00:40:53] Kristine Albrecht: They help me out quite a bit because they'll just say, this color that you like is not one that I would use that much. They, we have a couple of like bucket florists, and they say that's fine. A few in the bucket is fine. And, people tend to pick their flowers out of the bucket and Everybody has different tastes, but the florists tend to really know what they need for their events and their flora and for their weddings and things like that.

[00:41:19] Kristine Albrecht: And so they give us, I feel like one of the gifts that I have is that my florists and designers come to my farm. 

[00:41:28] Roz Chandler: I, yeah, I've got a florist in London that I deal with. A very big florist. She's got 10 full time people working for her. It's big. And we drive in at least once a week or twice a week.

[00:41:36] Roz Chandler: It's probably an hour's journey. But we fill the van up and we go. Fill the van up with tulips or dahlias or whatever. Now over the years of working with her, I've really learned what she wants. And it's not always the same as in florist number B down the road, because her work is mainly big homes in Chelsea and Kensington and London and some big corporate stuff.

[00:41:55] Roz Chandler: So it isn't pastels and it isn't pinks and isn't peaches or whites. It's big and bold and different and unusual and I don't want to have seen it anywhere else and I just want to have a look and I want to take all of that with some white cosmos please. And I've learned that. And you go to florist B, who can only be three miles away, and they're much more into bouquets, and they definitely do not want all that, all of that.

[00:42:17] Roz Chandler: So it's God, initially it was like, Oh God, how am I ever going to get this right? But yeah it's getting feedback from them and just saying to them, and there were certain things she absolutely hates, which if you asked another florist, they'd absolutely love. And you think, God, how could I get that so wrong unless you ask the question?

[00:42:34] Kristine Albrecht: Yeah, I know. I always ask him what do you like in this tub? And I get to know my florist, like you said Katie loves red, where a lot of the florists are like, yeah, I'll take some red, but not, but Katie, she comes to the farm and she's got bright red lipstick on and, bright clothes and she likes bright and she likes red, but yeah.

[00:42:52] Kristine Albrecht: Yeah. But then we'll have this other florist is like all my kind of blushy whites and pinks and stuff like that. But, all of them, they do follow what people are asking them for too. And they'll say, Hey, this week, is there any way you can put a bunch of burgundy in? Cause this person just wants burgundy.

[00:43:11] Kristine Albrecht: Or, we're doing this big car show, and it's for this company, and their colors are this. Can spin it for that this week? So we try to do that for our florists too. But we do, like you, get to know them, and what they like, and we're like, oh, this would be perfect in, flower shacks, tubs, because they would love these colors, or anyway it's really fun being able to work with florists and designers because as a grower, I just love to grow things, but I wouldn't know if my color sense is really what's needed out there. 

[00:43:41] Roz Chandler: Yeah. It's interesting getting to know them. Who's your inspiration? Every morning you've got to get up, you've got to think, today I've got a list of jobs that's always longer than you've got time to do.

[00:43:51] Roz Chandler: What keeps you going? 

[00:43:53] Kristine Albrecht: Yeah I would say at the beginning you, I don't know if you're familiar, you're probably familiar with Floret. Yeah anyway she was a big inspiration. She's supportive of the flower community. I don't know about everywhere, but here, for sure, she's so supportive and she's always what can I do to, help the flower community?

[00:44:14] Kristine Albrecht: And she has so many flowers. So many followers and so much influence and it's really It's really good, and she's written books, and she's inspired us to write books and get the word out and I think the other person that's super inspiring to me, as I talked about her a little earlier, is Janet who's my sister in law, who's the hybridizer.

[00:44:36] Kristine Albrecht: Yeah, she lives there. She, it's just, there's nothing like having someone. For me that I can call last week I called, I like, okay, I've got this and this going, what do you think I should do? And she just has 40 years of experience hybridizing so many different flowers that just feel like she's my, she's one of my biggest, Inspiration because I can rely on her.

[00:44:58] Kristine Albrecht: But yeah, Erin's great and her color sense is amazing. And I get inspired by her and just how hard she works and all the trials that she's done. Those are amazing. I used to go and buy flowers from our local florists, I mean from our local nursery and. They look pretty, but I'm like, are they going to even have a stem long enough for me to use in my bouquets?

[00:45:23] Kristine Albrecht: You don't know that, but Erin did all that work for all of us. So you now know that if you buy this seed, or you buy this variety, that it's going to have a long enough stem, stem to use. And just how she's pushing zinnias and new colors with Dawn Creek.

[00:45:39] Kristine Albrecht: She and Dawn Creek are working together and it's just amazing the colors they're coming up with. And Yeah. And in the Dahlia world, she's doing some really fun open center ones, the singles and the colorettes and the anemones and those really haven't been pushed to their limit at all, either in the show world.

[00:45:57] Kristine Albrecht: Again, there's all those perimeter colors. And, she's busted out of those parameters. In everything that she does, she's really looking at it from from from the perspective of a flower farmer, I think. And I think that's, I think that's, she's inspired many of us to start thinking that way because There.

[00:46:15] Kristine Albrecht: It just wasn't happening prior to Erin. So thank you, Erin, wherever you are. Thank 

[00:46:20] Roz Chandler: you. 

[00:46:20] Kristine Albrecht: Yeah, 

[00:46:20] Roz Chandler: thank you. Absolutely. Got all the books Follow you Done courses. Yeah, done. Exactly that. Brilliant. Yes, so thank very much for coming over. We're gonna put your book in the show notes, obviously follow you on Instagram and follow you and see what you're doing.

[00:46:35] Roz Chandler: I want to see the Coco Loco Dahlia coming up this year, and I'd love to see the brown one. Who knows? I know that's excitement, isn't it? That's why you do it. That's what it's about. But I want to thank you for coming over tonight. And yeah, thank you very much. Thank you so 

[00:46:48] Kristine Albrecht: much for having me on.

[00:46:49] Kristine Albrecht: I just love talking about Dahlias. You gave me a gift today. Thank you.