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We are once again forcing tulips for the winter. I debate every year about whether I want to tie up my whole winter picking tulips everyday, twice a day. But it's a pretty nice way to spend the dark and cold months of the year and I can do it in my pajamas.
I work with a flower collective of five farms and we place our orders together to get the best pricing possible. Sometimes we even work with the whole Maryland cut flower growers association to be able to make purchases collectively. Without being very careful to get the best prices for everything we buy it's hard to make a business like ours work and we take the job of sourcing very seriously. This allows us to be competitive with our pricing.
We primarily work with two companies to purchase bulbs. We consider colors, types and percentage of cuttable stems when we consider which varieties to buy. There are tulips which we love but do not grow because they do not produce enough good flowers. Sometimes we will buy just a couple hundred of these tulips (I'm looking at you La Belle Epoque) to sell to event designers who we know love them. But we have to increase the price for these because they are much, much more expensive bulbs and they have a high failure rate.
There's been a lot of talk in the flower growing world about tulips this year because the Netherlands has had two of the most devastating years for weather in modern history. In 2023 and 2024 unseasonably hot and unseasonably wet weather damaged a large number of tulip fields and we are told that some farmers are actually going out of business and that some varieties will probably never be seen again. Some very desirable tulip varieties are grown by only a small number of farms and this makes them even more susceptible if those farms have weather issues. Additionally, we've been told that the European Union has banned some fungicides that help with the production of tulips. Again, some much loved varieties are being lost because they are inherently genetically weak plants. (Tulips are extremely prone to fungal disease.)
A note on fungicide. We control the disease in tulips through organic fungicides which are approved for sustainable agriculture. We never use chemical fungicides. It's not worth it to me to use these products to produce flowers.
Warning: the next six paragraphs talk about economics, consumer behavior and business practices. If you only want to read about tulips please skip them.
The Netherlands is a flower kingdom with deep and wide knowledge and experience, growing many of the flowers that are imported around the world. (Take a deep dive into how they force lilacs in winter and you will find an unbelievable a story.) Everyone in the world relies on the tulip bulbs from the Netherlands and very few are raised for tulip production anywhere else. Ideally, tulips would also be produced in large countries like the U.S., China and Russia, for their own use. (These are the three countries that bought a huge percentage of tulip bulbs before the war in Ukraine--btw, Ukraine was also a huge consumer of tulips, which makes me sad.) Chinese cities buys hundreds of thousands of bulbs for public displays for their people to enjoy and they have 113 cities with over one million residents and many are buying on this huge scale (the U.S. has 9 cities with over one million people). In even the most crowded city in the U.S. children have playgrounds in their schools and people have little gardens here and there. In many cities in China schools do not have playgrounds and there is no open ground for growing. There is simply no room. But I digress.
My hope is that producers of bulbs will consider moving production to land in the U.S. We have excellent areas for growing them and could easily accommodate this kind of agriculture, but until then we will have to buy from the Netherlands.
Warnings have been going out from bulb brokers that we can expect this to be the last year of plentiful tulips until Holland is able to recover from the past two years. Apparently it could take 3-5 years of good weather to accomplish this since it takes several years to grow bulbs big enough to produce flowers.
Have you heard more than you cared to hear about the tulip business yet? Well, I'm a plant nerd who loves to research so I've got more.
We've all become used to seeing tulips for sale at very low prices in stores like Trader Joe's, Aldi and Lidl. These companies use flowers to entice you in. They are loss leaders, meaning that the business sells them at a loss for promotional purposes. I can't help but wonder if they will be able to continue to sell this flower in this way. They do have incredible purchasing power and I've only seen the inexpensive single tulips in these stores, but my understanding is that even common tulips may be hard to get for a couple years.
Back to tulips. This is our fourth year forcing them on a large scale (by large I mean over 15,000, which is miniscule, really). We feel like we've pretty much gotten our system down. Our team spends the week of Thanksgiving planting all our tulips in crates with sterile potting mix and we load them into our cooler. We stack them almost to the ceiling and are basically constrained to the number we are growing because that's all that will fit. They are very, very well-watered before they go into storage and start sending out roots right away. We take them out as the leaves start to grow and move them into our cellar. The furnace is in this space so it's quite warm and we are able to keep it at the right growing temp. The tulips get watered every day or two with a hose attached to the water heater--I didn't know all water heaters have a hose attachment until I started doing this. As I said, it's a cellar and the floor gets pretty messy. Farming is messy. I'm willing to live with that. After a few weeks the tulips are ready to pick and to store in our second cooler. December is a nice bit of down time while the bulbs root and grow and the first flowers are cut about the first day of the year.
This week, the second week of January, was our first week of tulip deliveries and it's exciting to go down to the basement each morning. We plan to harvest almost all our tulips in Jan. and Feb. this year since these are the months when they are really desirable.
Here's a few pics of the tulips we are growing this year:
If you would like to enjoy these flowers in your home this winter please check out our shop and buy yourself a subscription. We'd love to send some your way.
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