Tulips as Cut Flowers: Harvesting and planting tulips for the cutting garden!

Hey guys, it's Brie here at Blossom and Branch Farm and as you can see from the bed I'm next to, we are ready to harvest some tulips. So we planted these tulips in the fall and even though they're one that I'm probably not going to be growing anymore because there is so much time invested into growing tulips and they're quite expensive. Um, ideally we're spending 50 to 75 cents per bulb, but this year we went with a higher quality company. We actually got our bulbs from Johnny's because we had been buying cheaper bulbs and we were finding that a lot of them had fungus and disease and tulip fire and we just decided to spend the money to get higher quality bulbs. So we got bulbs from Johnny's, which are a little bit more expensive. So we're going to talk a little bit today about how we harvest our tulips and also how we price them. All right, let's go. Let's talk about spacing for planting these guys. Now it's not super complicated and you definitely have some flexibility, especially with spacing. You can either put them scattered throughout your beds as a nice little pop of color in the spring, or you can cluster them all together in a raised bed or in the ground for a big massive pop of color. Now I do often get asked why we don't do no dig for tulip planting. There is a strategy out there for planting tulips without having to till. Now we don't till to plant our tulips, but we do dig up all the soil in these beds. We put it on a tarp, we plant the bulbs and then we replace the soil. So there's a method that includes less soil disturbance that just involves planting the bulbs on top of the soil and then placing the compost on top. If you watched our video on raised beds and the lasagna method in no dig, we do not do the no till method with tulips because it requires so much compost. The problem with doing that that we found is that number one, compost is very expensive, especially high quality compost. So that really drives the price up for us in terms of growing tulips. And many farmers kind of justify that by saying that they'll use that compost after the tulips grow. They kind of reshuffle that compost out to other beds on their farms. And the problem that we have here is that we have high phosphorus levels in our soil. So we can't and really should not be applying more compost because most compost contains high levels of phosphorus. So if we go over applying phosphorus in our beds, it can create a lot of issues soil health wise and also ecologically. We really don't apply compost anymore. We rely more on cover cropping to amend our soil. Something to consider if you're considering no dig planting or tulips is make sure that you're testing your soil and making sure your phosphorus levels aren't too high. It's very hard to know whether your compost has been contaminated with something like bio solids, human waste, which contains PFAS forever chemicals or whether you have a lot of manure in that compost, which can lead to high salt and phosphorus levels in the garden, which is really hard to fix. So you can see in this bed we actually have a few different varieties of tulips. Now I was anticipating having a different situation this spring, so I didn't think I was going to be harvesting that many. So I should have planted all the same tulip in one bed, but I didn't do that. Instead I have four different types in this bed and you can see I planted them according to height. So here in the back are our tallest and earliest bloomers. If I had planted these on the opposite side, they'd be shading these out. The other thing I've done is you can see I've spaced them very tightly and we spaced them tightly. Number one, to help prevent weeds. And also because you can, uh, with tulips, you don't have to follow a six inch spacing like they recommend on the package. That's really more for perennializing bulbs and tulips do not perennialize. Definitely not in my zone. Now in their ideal growing climate, they may perennialize. They prefer to have cold moist winters and dry hot summers. We don't perennialize them because we just don't have enough space to dedicate one area to just tulips and let that bed dry out over summer. Instead what I do is I reuse the area that I grew the tulips in and if I were to plant over this, they would get too much water over the summer and they wouldn't bloom the next year. Some of these fancier tulips also just don't bloom the second year anyway. They don't really perennialize. It's just not what they do. They'll only bloom really well for one year. So in our harvesting, we pull them up by the bulb and we pull up the whole bulb again because they don't really perennialize. Now, if you were growing a variety that does perennialize and one of them is the Darwin varieties, those ones may have better luck perennializing and re-blooming every year. But I'm going to show you how we harvest ours. What I look for is this, it's called crack stage. This is right when the flowers are starting to show some color. So these are actually a light yellow variety. And so you can see that we're starting to get some yellow coming in. So what I do is I make sure I water my bulbs well first. And so tulips actually prefer more water than most people think. So we do make sure we are watering these once they start coming up, especially for having a dry spring. And then you can see I've gone ahead and pulled the whole thing up and out of the ground, which is fairly easy because we have nice wet soil in here. Once I've harvested them, I pull it up and I just pop it with the bulb on into a couple of inches of water. There's some people dry store these, so they would cut off the bulb and they would store them out of water for up to three weeks. If you're harvesting them at the right stage, which is at this stage right before they've started to open, then you can store them for longer in a fridge. You would cut off the bulb, wrap them in paper, store them in about a 35 degree environment, and then you'd be able to cut them and put them into water and they would open up a little bit later. You can do that. It's not something that I really do here that much. I prefer to store with the bulb on in water. I just find that they don't get as floppy and we don't lose as much base life by doing it that way. Doing the dry storage method. Sometimes you can tend to lose some of the base life. It just isn't as good. So you can see these are coming up nice and long out of the ground. Now winter chill hours are required for tulips. So if you want to have good tulips, you need to have usually at least 12 to 16 weeks of below freezing temperatures and that can be tricky even in my zone and zone five, six. And this year we happen to have a cold winter and they did pretty well. But last year we had a very warm winter and they really didn't get the chill hours that they needed. They were short. Lots of them didn't bloom. And then we also had that tulip fire fungus last year. So last year was a major fail, but it's funny when you're growing cut flowers because you have to order all of these bulbs. So far in advance, we ordered these actually back in February last year. So over a year ago, which makes it really difficult to plan during harvest season. We usually harvest two or three times a day because they will very quickly color up. And this is more of a time intensive harvest because I'm having to be careful as I pull out the bulbs that I don't break them. When we're talking about costs, that's important because it's a little bit more expensive to harvest this way. Harvesting and then cleaning because I'm going to have to cut all these bulbs off before I put these into bouquets, which is going to be the next step. So cleaning up these stems, cutting these off, peeling these back, all takes time because these are grown as an annual crop. We can't depreciate the cost of the bulbs. So for example, a lot of people think that you can just leave the tulips in the ground harvest from them every year and it's a one time expense. But as you can see, it's not because we're pulling up the bulb. We have to replant new bulbs every year. Okay. So now that we have the tulips all clean, I'm just assembling the bouquets and I'm going to talk through pricing as we do this. So CSA bouquets, I typically don't do a whole lot of arranging to you. I just let people do that when they get home, but I still like them to look nice. So I like to place the greens in there nicely. Don't just slap it together. So I'm doing 12 tulips in each bouquet. So I'm charging around $35 for each bouquet. And the way that that math works out is that I try to charge at least three times my cost. So even though my cost to grow is around a dollar, I also have to account for my labor hours. I have to account for things like insurance costs on maintenance, on equipment, marketing, running the business. There's just so many more things that go into it than just the flower. So our markup is standard around three times, at least for retail, for weddings. It's more because we're doing more time that's going into the arranging piece of it, heavy duty cutter. And then I'm going to wrap them paper. So once these are all wrapped up, they are ready to go home. And then I always send out a little note telling people how to care for them and how to make sure that they stay fresh the longest. I keep them in water. So this is the night before our CSA pickup. So I'm going to go ahead and put these back into water and into the cooler overnight. So they're going to be super fresh. I've just found that people really like to come to the farm for CSA pickup. People really love to come and see the sheep. They love to walk around. They love to chat and have community around their CSA. And that's part of the value of doing a CSA. Obviously also supporting American grown. And these are much fresher than the tulips that you'll get that are usually imported from the Netherlands. So these are going to last a lot longer. So I hope you enjoyed this little glimpse into making CSA bouquets with me. I hope that it encourages you to find a flower farmer close to you and support them with a community supported agriculture bouquet subscription. If you'd like this video, please like, and subscribe. We really appreciate that. And if you have something else you want to know about, or you want to see, let me know below. Thanks guys. See you next time at the farm.