Dahlias

All about Dahlias - growing, propagating and enjoying. Photos welcome.

I have a dahlia problem -
I have 3 different varieties in pots that stand in a row on the deck and something keeps chopping off the stems of the middle one at soil level.
There is no damage to the leaves, no evidence of a snail/slug trail on the pot or top of the compost and I've checked for snails at night. I moved the pot up onto my potting bench and it was fine for 2 days and then this morning another severd stem. The damage to the stem is a tiny version of the shape left by beavers when they fell trees! I did find a lone vine weevil adult on the deck, but again the damage doesn't look like vine weevil damage - no notches on the leaves.
On the plus side I'm getting an awful lot of new cuttings ...
Cheers all.

Edit - and a root around just below the soil didn't find anything, and there are lots of fresh new shoots coming through which would make much better eating!

With the aid of a torch and a teaspoon I've found the culprit - a cutworm, the larvae of one of noctuid moths, It was a good size and I dropped it in the hedge in the hope that either something will benefit from a meal or it will find something else to eat!

My dahlias are starting to bloom...I seem to have lost lots of labels but I'm hoping I can name them once they start. The tubers from last years seeds bulked up nicely.

I got a few new tubers but I wasn't so impressed this year - I had what I think was leaf gall/ or maybe even crown gall? I did complain and had some new tubers sent but it doesn't make up for the work I did or the compost that I used on them when it was so difficult to get.

Here's some photos just Incase someone else gets similar. The stems come up very spindly, lots of them and if you scrape off or wash the soil away you can see loads of little nodes on the the tuber that push out lots of tiny thin leafy stems. I had to bin them and the soil.

After having a look at Scarlets thread with the photos of her dahlias, where she shows the dark leaved Bishops varieties, I would recommend that rather than paying a lot of money for a named variety  that you sow Bishops Children seeds, you will get some plants similar to named varieties, but also some unique plants, which of course you can name