What are Tuber Flower Bulbs?

Video Transcript

"YOLANDA VANVEEN: Hi. This is Yolanda Vanveen on behalf of Expert Village. Today, we're going to talk about what is a tuber and what is a rhizome and what do you do with these flower bulbs. These are all considered rhizomes: I have a Dahlia, a Bearded Iris and a colored Calla Lily also called Zantedeschia or an Aethiopica family. And basically, a rhizome or a tuber is anything that has a fleshy material inside. So, if you break it apart, you'll see it looks like a potato inside, so pretty much the rhizome and tubers all have this fleshy potato-type interior. So, when you have a bulb and if you don't know if it's good or not, you can always break parts of it off and if it looks like a potato inside, your bulbs are still good and I've been amazed; you can have just a little part of a portion of a piece of a cell of one of these bulbs and as long as it looks like a potato and it's healthy and it's not mushy, it will reproduce. It will clone itself so you'll have thousands more plants over the years. Dahlias, this is how they produce: You've got the mother plants and the mother has babies, and the babies actually will grow by themselves but I also prefer, same thing, when I have a mother plant with babies, I don't separate those babies until they're as big as the mother plant. And as long as you've got part of the stem and part of the bulb together on this plant, it will reproduce and you'll have lots and lots of Dahlias over the future years. Next, we're going to talk about the difference between a tuber, a true bulb and a rootstock."