Planting and Growing Tulips
For awesome April color in your garden
Tulips are a type of flower that originally came from Turkey (although they were really made famous by the Netherlands) and is a bulb that you plant in the fall. Under the right conditions they are perennial, meaning they will come back and flower year after year. They will also reproduce so that your tulip beds grow a little bit bigger each year.
Colorings for tulips are vast, with many different shades and tones available. There are also variations in how the flowers petals are edged (smooth or ruffled) and a desirable flower virus is responsible for some gorgeous, multi-color varietals.
The Beauty of Tulips
Tulips in your Garden
There are a a lot of variations in the petals of tulips and the color options are seemingly endless, so there's a tulip for just about everyone! Be sure to check your growing zone to see if these beautiful flowers are suitable for where you live before planting. (Too cold or wet and the bulbs can rot or die over the winter). Although most often grown in the ground, you can also grow tulips in pots. They bloom in the spring, although just when can vary depending on how harsh the winter was and how warm the weather is in spring.
Being a bulb, planting tulips can be really fun as it's easy to put them in little groups, make a border or even just dot them in between other plants as accents. Just remember, if you want a big solid bed, that will take dozens or hundreds of bulbs, depending on the size you want.
Tulips make a great cut flower too. They can be used sparingly in a mixed bouquet or you can have a large bunch of them in a vase by themselves. If you are growing tulips for cut flowers, be sure and leave a good amount of stem on them when you pick them so that you can trim the stems a little bit every other day once they are in the vase. This allows the flowers to keep drawing up water and helps them to stay fresher longer.
You'll want a bulb planter
Dig Up or Stay Put
One thing you want to do before you start tulip gardening is check your temperature zone. While tulips will do well in a wide variety of climates, in some places they will overwinter just fine in the ground and in others they will need to be dug up and stored inside to protect them from freezing.
It's important to know before you start planting lots of bulbs which strategy is going to apply to your tulips.
Tulip Tips
- How to Buy Tulip Bulbs
With any project, its important to start with good quality materials. If you were going to build a house, for example, you wouldnt buy substandard lumber. In the same way, its important to choose good quality tulip bulbs... - Tulips - Tips for growing
Tulips are classified with perennials but often need to be treated as annuals. Dig up your tulips once the foliage has died and store them in a cool dry area such as your garage or cellar then replant them again in the fall. - Tulip Bulbs
Tulips require a period of cold while they're dormant and resting between shows. That means you must plant before freezing weather, then get your great display in the spring...
My Experiences with Tulips
If there's one thing I learned when I got to visit a tulip farm, it was that more really is better when it comes to tulips. Planted in just ones or twos doesn't look right at all. Tulips look best in a garden when they are in bunches or clusters. You may not have the room to do huge beds like in some of these pictures, but if you get different types of tulips, be sure to plant them so that all the bulbs of one kind are together in a smaller area.
Different types of tulips might bloom a little differently but overall if you plant a lot of tulips they are all going to open at roughly the same time of the year. This can make for a really dramatic garden for about a month, and then it might get really boring looking when all the tulips are done. If you just love tulips that might be fine, but if you like a mix, think about planting some patches with tulips and then put other kinds of flowers planted in the areas next to the tulips or in between the tulip patches. This way your garden will have different flowers blooming at different times of the spring and summer.
Getting Started in the Garden
Nancy will show you just what to do.
