Growing and harvesting tulips for cut flowers

Growing and Harvesting Tulips for Cut Flowers

We plant around 20,000 tulip bulbs at Fern Verrow. Half are grown in our polytunnels and greenhouses and the other half outdoors.

Tulips are one of my favourite flowers to grow as they reward you with a blast of incredible colour after the long winter, heralding the arrival of spring.

Different Varieties of Tulips

I'm always trying to find something new and interesting by browsing through catalogues and through meeting with suppliers.

There are 15 species of tulips to choose from, including Darwin, single earlies, single lates and species tulips, the latter of which are wild varieties.

How to Grow Tulips

We treat all our bulbs as annuals, meaning once we cut the flowers, we also compost the bulbs.

Why do we do this? Because often they don't come back as a true tulip the following year. While it's safer to leave them in the ground if you're growing on a smaller scale, sometimes they will still come up blind (without a flower).

We also wait as long as possible to plant our tulip bulbs. Our ideal window for planting is late November/early December.

If you plant them earlier, they might start to grow before being stopped by the cold weather. This can cause them to become quite short, which is not good news for commercial growers.

Where to Buy Bulbs

Most tulip bulbs come from the Netherlands, where tulips have been grown for centuries. While they are not organic unfortunately, the Dutch growers produce the best bulbs in the world.

Some English farms are now producing organic tulips, but it will take a while for these growers to produce a range that can match the varieties available from Dutch growers.

Jane's recommended suppliers:

Parkers – have an enormous selection of tulip bulbs

Farmer Gracy – can provide frilly, glamorous tulips

Sarah Raven – for tasteful and beautiful tulips.