Birds are chirping, flowers are blooming and the sun has even come out a handful of times ! It is spring in Ohio after all...where rain and clouds are more prevalent than sunshine. I think that makes us all the more grateful for the colors of spring.
This past October we planted 4,000 tulips. We are often asked if we have a "tulip field" and the short answer is no, we do not. It's easy to picture the beautiful fields of Holland, with rows of colorful tulips as far as the eye can see. In Holland, and other production farms on the west coast, they harvest bulbs. We harvest flowers. The best way to grow tulips as cut flowers is treating them as annuals every year, which means every fall we plant brand new bulbs. You can see them just starting to pop up in our raised garden bed below, this was taken in March.
When you're selling tulips as cut flowers, you don't wait for them to "bloom" per say. You harvest right BEFORE they bloom, so that your customer has flowers with the longest vase life possible. Flowers you buy at your local grocery store were likely harvested and flown on a plane days if not weeks before they make it to your kitchen table. Our flowers last a long time, simply because they are fresh. Below is a picture of the perfect time to harvest a tulip; hence another reason we do not have "blooming fields" of tulips :)
We hope this blog post helped answer many of the questions we often get regarding our farm and the tulips. Every year we are told how tulips are many peoples FAVORITE flower, and to be honest, they're ours too! Make sure you stop by our flower stand the next few weekends to grab yourself a bouquet!
