Tulips, Tulips, Tulips, more Tulips!

It is hard to believe that April is now behind us and my entire tulip season flew by without managing to get a blog post together about them! I'll give myself some grace as this is a very busy time of year with seed starting, getting plants in the ground, watering the seedlings, covering and uncovering fragile plants in the unpredictable weather, delivering orders, weeding and cleaning up the flower beds, and the list goes on...

But tulips are the stars of my early spring offerings! These well known beauties really are a highlight of the year for me. While my daffodils pop up a bit earlier in the year (and I have some truly lovely varieties of daffodils), their toxic sap makes them a bit trickier to use in mixed bouquets. Tulips on the other hand play nice with other flowers in a vase or can make up a glorious arrangement all on their own, all while lasting about a week (if not more in some cases)!

Believe it or not, my process for getting tulips to my customers starts a whole year before they are even harvested. Typing this is a reminder to myself that I truly do need to get my order in for next year. While I won't receive the bulbs until this fall, in order to secure the varieties I really want (and honestly some are already sold out at this point through some wholesalers) orders should be placed around the time of harvesting this year's crop. So if you have any requests for next year, let me know ASAP!

My process for growing tulips is a little different from the typical method. Since I plant about 2,500 bulbs each fall (late October/early November), I need something easier than crawling around on my hands and knees digging 6" holes for each bulb! Enter the raised bed method. In the fall, I construct 4'x8' beds with a depth of 8". The bulbs go directly into the bottom of these empty beds, packed together as tightly as possible without them touching. With this spacing, I'm able to plant all 2,500 bulbs in just 3 beds! I then cover the bulbs with 6-8" of compost and pretty much forget about them until they start popping up in the spring! If the compost was extremely dry, I may water it well, but in general the compost hold moisture quite well so I don't want them to be too wet.

While I take my winter's rest, these babies do their thing and then begin breaking the surface in early March. At this point, if the weather is dry, I will begin to water them.

Once the tulips bud and start to color up, the madness begins! Just like with most other flowers, the key to a long vase life is the proper harvest stage. Tulips are an amazing flower in many ways, but one characteristic that blows my mind is their ability to continue growing, even after they have been harvested. Seriously, they can continue to mature and lengthen up to 4" or more in the vase! All that to say, you can harvest tulips quite early in their bloom development. I harvest single varieties while the blooms are still closed and mostly green with just a tiny bit of color showing and doubles are harvested a little further along when they are mostly colored up and just beginning to crack open.

But you might be asking yourself, "What is a single or double tulip?". Great question! To be honest, before getting into the flower growing biz, I only knew about the standard single tulips - varieties that only have one layer of petals. These are an amazing staple crop that come in a huge variety of colors, and are a little less expensive than the fancier varieties. They can be a bit more finicky in that I need to pay close attention to them in order to harvest them before they blow open. On a warm or windy day, I really need to go out multiple times a day to harvest because they can go from tightly closed to fully open in just a few hours! The double varieties, also known as peony flowering, are a bit slower to open. They have multiple layers of petals and an amazing vase life. While they are a bit more expensive, I find their beauty to be well worth the investment.

As if those two varieties aren't amazing enough, there are two other categories of tulips that I have also grown: Parrot and lily-flowering. Very sadly, I wasn't able to grow any of the parrot variety this year because my orders for several varieties were cancelled soon before they were scheduled to be delivered (aka the fall, aka waaay to late to be able to find any more at a wholesale price). The lily flowering ones were new to me as a cut flower this year, and I have to say, I will definitely be growing them again! Tulips are categorized by their bloom time - early, mid, or late - and these ones are definitely on the late end of the season, but well worth the wait. They have a long vase life, and as the name indicates, a beautiful lily-like bloom. You can see from the picture below how much the stem lengthened and how gracefully the bloom opened. The flower continued to look good for another day or two, and this was all while it was placed in a sunny window.

As I mentioned earlier, tulips can bloom very quickly, so how do I manage to sell these beauties to customers over the course of several weeks!? There are a number of methods that I employ to make the season a bit more manageable:

1. I plant a wide variety of tulips that have different bloom times, attempting to have a good mix of colors throughout the different stages of the season

2. I put some of the tulips into longer term storage. Sometimes hundreds of tulips bloom in one day and I just don't have time to deal with them or don't need them quite yet, but they do need to be harvested or will be useless to me. Tulips are amazing in that they can be stored dry for several weeks in a cooler and then bloom up perfectly once they are re-hydrated and brought to room temperature! Storing them dry can be done with the bulb on or off (though I've had better luck with the bulb on method). To store them with the bulb on, I simply pull up the entire plant - which is super easy in a raised bed full of compost- and pack them in a crate lined with paper or empty grain feed bags (use whatever is available, right!?). Check out this video on how fun it is to pull the bulb! You don't want the bulb to dry out or rot so they need to go into storage relatively dry, but then well wrapped. When it is time to use them, I snip off the bulb, strip the bottom leaves, wash them, rubber band 10 of them together, wrap them in paper (except for about 4 inches at the bottom), and them place them in water. The paper and rubber bands are used to support stems as they rehydrate. They are usually super floppy and limp after being stored dry, but will become rigid again in whatever shape that they rehydrate in, so straight up and down is what I usually aim for!

3. When their bloom time coincides with when I actually need them and have time to process them, the tulips are harvested into a bucket of water and then placed in the cooler. The process of pulling them is still the same, bulb and all, but I snip the bulb, strip leaves, clean, and bundle them with rubber bands all out in the field. Then straight to the cooler until I'm ready to use them!

Maybe that was more information than you ever needed to know about tulips, but there you have it! I'm looking forward to a rainy day this weekend to buckle down and figure out next year's tulip selection. Some favorites this year were Palmyra, Queensday and Finola from Johnny's and Columbus, and Fire Wings from ADR Bulbs.

Up next in the fields are ranunculus, peonies, and a number of other late spring beauties that I can't wait to share about in my next post! It is a beautiful world out there, friends!