Spring may seem far away, but getting ready by tucking a few tulip bulbs in the ground is one of fall’s most satisfying tasks. It really isn’t hard. It feels so good in the winter to know that they are out there happily chilling. And the returns in the spring are so much bigger than your efforts. Right when you need living things, color and beauty most of all, they show up and perform.

Bulb season is right around the corner.

So, I want to give you a few tips to get you ready for the season and to help you learn a few things unique to tulips. Let’s get inspired to make the effort now for that big pay off in the spring.

Here’s what you need to know.

*La Belle Epoch, one of our favorite for it’s stunning color*

Commercial production - how we do it at the farm

The way we grow tulips at the farm is nothing like the way you’d want to plant and grow in your own garden. If you look at a tulip, you’ll notice that all of its leaves grow from the flower stem. So, when you cut it, there is little to nothing left behind to regenerate the bulb to make another flower again next year. If you cut your tulips, that’s one reason why they diminish and disappear after a few years.

Our focus is on cut flowers and we need them to be fabulous every single year. For that, and several other reasons, we treat tulips like annuals - buying new bulbs every fall. We source from a Dutch bulb broker that I’ve been working with for years. He helps us get bulbs that are reserved for the commercial cut flower industry, which is another reason why they seem so spectacular.

*Apricot Parrot, a mid season bloomer, still in the field*

Because the entire bulb is pulled at harvest time, we plant for production not aesthetics. Over the years, we’ve developed a temporary raised bed system that we build each fall for the tulips and we pack thousands of bulbs in like eggs in a crate. It all comes out in the spring and a summer annual takes over the bed.

The bottom of the bed is sealed with 1/4” hardware cloth and a similar lid goes on the top after the bulbs are buried in compost to keep voles away. We can get 10,000 tulips in just 2 beds (4’x70’).

*Gudoshnik: a giant peony type mid season bloomer that we can’t live without*

Growing tulips in your home garden

For your own garden, your goals are going to be completely different. You want to be able to enjoy the beauty of the flowers in the landscape, have a tulip blooming season that lasts, and to cut a few to bring inside.

Here are some things to consider:

As you are selecting varieties, don’t just look at one pretty flower at a time. Think about how they will look together in the landscape. Choose a color palette first and then seek out blooms that paint that picture. They can be shades of similar colors or a fun contrast that looks interesting together like brownish orange and deep purple. You can even plant them so one color fades into another. Think it through.
Choose a range of bloom times to make the show last. Tulips come in early blooming, mid season blooming and late blooming varieties. Get some of each.
For example, we always start the season early with Exotic Emperor (also known as White Mountain) and Super Parrot then finish with a very late blooming tall single called Menton. That stretches our season over 6 weeks.
Plant in natural looking patterns. It‘s tempting to make random polka dot holes all over the garden sticking individual bulbs here and there. That’s fine. Tulips are beautiful either way. But if you think about planting them in drifts, they will look more natural and will create a sense of life and movement in your garden that will be much prettier. Plus, tulips can create gorgeous brush strokes of color blocks in your garden if they are massed together rather than scattered about.

*Instead of individual holes for each bulb, get your shovel out and dig a bigger organically shaped hole where you can plant 10 bulbs or more altogether as a collection.*

Dig into the details on planting

Spacing

Because we pull everything out each spring, we plant bulbs about 1/4” apart from one another. You’re going to want some more room than that. Give them a few inches for breathing space if you plan to keep them in the garden for the coming years. A few varieties will produce baby bulbs and spread some. Just for example, the Charming Lady / Charming Beauty series does this quite readily.

But, typically, tulips will not spread and naturalize as easily daffodils. Just keep that in mind.

Planting Depth

Tuck your bulbs in a good 6” below the surface. If you want them to last many years, you can go even deeper to help keep them cool during the summer months.

Fertilizer

Tulips like bone meal. You can sprinkle a little in the hole as you plant and then top dress in the fall in future years once they have perennialized. Be careful. Dogs also love bone meal. It’s not poisonous but they will eat it if they can. I had a dog get a five pound bag out of my shed and she ate a good bit of it before I caught her. So turn it in a bit when you top dress, or the tulips might never get any.

Keep them safe

Squirrels are the biggest tulip pest in town. We don’t have any out at the farm but I know they dig up bulbs. I don’t have a good answer for that other than planting deep enough. It’s possible that top dressing with a little blood meal might deter them. Worth a try.

While we may have escaped squirrel antics, the pressure from voles is serious. Over the years, we’ve developed a pretty elaborate strategy for dealing with them that wouldn’t make any sense in a home garden situation.

But, there’s one piece of our plan that can work for you. We make extensive use of a product called Mole Max. It is simply pelleted castor oil. So it is non toxic and won’t hurt a thing. But the voles don’t like the smell and will avoid it. We use it successfully to keep them off of our Dahlias all summer. So, I recommend it if you have those pesky creatures in your garden. I sincerely hope you don’t because they can cause a lot of damage.

Make them last

Most varieties won’t last and spread in the garden over the years as readily as daffodils. But, there are a few things you can do to establish an annual tulip wave:

Don’t cut the flowers. Deadhead once the bloom is done and let all the green growth die back naturally to feed and strengthen the bulb.
If you do cut them, make sure a few leaves remain with the plant.
Plant at least 6” deep. 8”-10” is better because the bulb will stay cooler during the summer
Buy new bulbs and plant more every year.

I hope you are excited about planning a bulb garden yourself this year and I hope you send me pictures of your blooms in the spring. I can’t get enough of that stuff.

Here at the farm, we are anxiously waiting for our bulb shipment to arrive and for the annual fall tulip vortex to open as we work to get them all tucked in for the next season. Will you be out there planting too?