In a former hayfield on the outskirts of town, Dianne Reitan diligently cares for her babies.

These babies aren’t of the giggling and drooling variety. These babies are organic dahlias, some upwards of 6 feet tall, which point their crimson, yellow, orange and pink fractal faces toward the sun while soaking up the well water and nutritious soil on the 28-acre property of the nonprofit Western Museum of Mining and Industry.

“I love how much joy they bring me and, more importantly, how much joy they bring everyone else,” said Reitan, owner of Dianne’s Dahlias. “People just light up.”

Her babies have beautiful names: Cafe Au Lait, Pooh, Cornel, Bohemian Spartacus, Canby Crazy, Coral Gypsy. And they’re prolific. Reitan has 900 plants in 350 varieties, which produce 20 to 50 blooms per plant. That equation equals bountiful bouquets that she sells Mondays and Wednesdays at a farm stand near the museum dedicated to the mining history and industrial technology of the Western U.S.

“They’re like a painting,” said Phyllis Fullerton, the farm stand’s first customer on a warm September Monday morning. “They’re just perfect.”

A single dahlia is $8 and bouquets run about $26-$64. Subscribers who get a new bouquet every week or month get a 10% discount. Buying the blossoms is also a gesture of philanthropy — Reitan, who serves on the museum’s board, leases the land and well water from the museum.

“As a retired fundraiser I’m always looking at ways to diversify a nonprofit’s income sources,” she said. “I was wanting to start a flower farm, but we’re in the middle of a big city that’s kind of dry, so if I have a flower farm at the museum I’m helping them get exposure and extra income.”

This is Reitan’s second season nurturing the late summer bloomers at the museum. They arise from the soil come the second week of August and glow through October, as long as Reitan can thwart “Frostmas”: “When that first frost comes and all the flower farmers say thank goodness, I can stop,” she says, laughing.

She’ll attempt to insulate the two hoop houses where most of the dahlias live with plastic and add rain barrels warmed by the sun.

“They bring a whole different crop of people who are very interested in flowers, but may not be thinking of us, as a mining or history museum,” said museum Executive Director Grant Dewey. “It adds to our natural landscape here for our campus.”

Dahlias aren’t that difficult to grow. They require the usual suspects: eight hours of sun, a bunch of water and good soil. There’s really only one deterrent to mothering dahlias, and that’s what gardeners call “the great dahlia dig” at the end of the season. Come October, Reitan will have to dig up those 900 plants, preserving the crown and the tubers from which the plants sprout. And those tubers are like mice — they multiply relentlessly. One tuber at the beginning of the season will have multiplied into five to 10 tubers at the end.

“It’s wonderful to expand the farm, but most people won’t deal with the great dahlia dig,” Reitan said. “That’s why dahlias are more rare and more expensive, because they’re more labor intensive and you have to dig the crown up. To do that you have to divide up all the tubers, wrap them either in plastic or some vermiculite, put them away for the winter and bring them out in spring and start all over again.”

Reitan learned through experience both the beauty and hard work that goes into birthing dahlias after she and her husband acquired a plot with full sun in the Charmaine Nymann Community Garden at Bear Creek Regional Park during the pandemic. At the same time she picked up a Martha Stewart Living magazine featuring a story about dahlias, which she’d never heard of before. She liked the sound and look of them and planted eight tubers. Seven came up.

“I had more flowers than I knew what to do with. I was giving them away to everyone at the community garden,” she said. “The second year I had 30 plants because that tuber multiplies and by the end of that second year I had over 200 tubers. The community garden said you can’t keep taking over these plots with these flowers, as beautiful as they are.”

That’s when inspiration hit to bring her flower farm to the museum. “We combined passions and purpose and it works out great,” Dewey said.

Reitan also finds her blooms are popular with brides, especially those who get married on-site in the museum’s restored 1893 barn. Event planners and florists can pop into the hoop houses and point out which dahlias they’d like cut.

“They’re a little more rare. They’re not something you’ll see at the grocery store,” Reitan said. “They’re not flown in on the jumbo jets like roses or carnations. A lot of my customers have never even heard of the dahlia. And we’re in Colorado — there are just not that many dahlia farms in Colorado.”