Potted Tulips

There’s a sea of potted tulips in the stores now and I suspect more than a few have drifted into assorted kitchens in the guise of Valentine’s Day presents. What follows is a quick and dirty guide to the growing and rescue of these bulbs.

Enjoy and How To Extend the Bloom

The first step of course is to enjoy the blooms for as long as possible. You can extend the bloom time by keeping the plant as cool as possible. Hot air (whether from furnaces of protestations of undying love) will shorten the length of time the flowers will last. Keeping the soil slightly damp will also extend the bloom time; use the finger-test, if the soil is damp, leave it alone. If the soil is dry, soak it. Drying the plant out and keeping it warm are two quick ways you can eliminate the plant, I’ll have to leave it to you about how you get rid of the unwanted suitor. So cool and slightly damp will do the trick if you only want a few blooms. If you want to get this plant to bloom again, you have to take it a few steps further.

Conditions To Get it to Rebloom

To get a potted tulip (or any outdoor bulb for that matter) to bloom again, you have to treat it as if it were outside. The first rule is to grow the foliage. This means that when the flowers are fading and falling apart, you snip off the stem of the flower as close to the base as you can. This gets rid of that silly flower and it’s desire to set seed. You’re left with some rather ugly leaves but these leaves are critical for next year. They’re making all the sugars that get pumped down to the bulb so the bulb can produce another flower for next year.

One Bloom Session Per Year

And no, sorry you only get one flower show per bulb per year. You want full sun or as much light as you can provide in a nice cool area of the house. You won’t grow if you don’t eat and it’s the same thing with a bulb. Not only does it need sunshine, it requires plant food. So get some houseplant food, read the directions and follow them with this lovely bulb. Those directions are going to tell you to feed it once a week in the growing season and this is it. Full sunlight and plant food will help the bulb grow strong enough to produce another flower.

Leaf Management

You don’t want to tie up the leaves, cut them off or do anything to them other than allow them to grow as big and strong as they can. That’s it. Easy gardening. All you’ll do between now and late May is feed and water and try to keep those leaves growing. If you don’t give them enough sunshine, they’ll get long and ugly. Relax, the odds are that you simply can’t give them enough light and this is to be expected. So by the end of May, you’ve done well if the leaves are alive, dark green but long and ugly.

After Frost - Out it Goes

At the end of May or when you believe all danger of frost is over, take those ugly leaves and potted bulbs out to the garden. Plant them (soil and all) into the garden where you’d like them to live. Plant them so the level of the soil is at the same level of the potted soil. The bulbs themselves will adjust their depth over the next few years to where they want to be. When the leaves finally go yellow and die, you can cut them off. You’ve done it! Next spring, those same Valentine’s Day potted tulips will rebloom in your garden as a reminder of this year’s gift. It’s up to you if you really want to remember or not.

In the House Again? Or not?

Now the fun thing is to decide you want to grow these same potted tulips in the house again. Maybe you don’t have an outdoor garden, maybe you just want to keep potted tulips around to remind you of Mr Hunk. (or Ms Gorgeous - I’m an equal opportunity writer). You plant them outdoors, the leaves go yellow. Then you dig them up. If you’ve grown them properly between now and then, the bulb has enough energy for a new flower. You’re a winner! Leave them sit cool and dry for the summer. Don’t bake them, don’t put them in the freezer, just leave them alone (in a place where you’ll remember where they are) in a well-ventilated spot to contemplate their future.

First Steps in Mid-October

This future is going to start again in mid-October when you replant them and turn them into your own potted tulip farm.

The simplest way is to take a 15 cm (6-inch) pot, put 3 cm (1-inch) of soil in the bottom and arrange the bulbs so they’re just touching each other (not jammed in but no large spaces between them) and then cover with soil to the top of the pot. I suggest labelling the pot but that’s up to you. Soak the pot with water and then put outside until freezeup.

We need to give them 14-16 weeks of cold weather. So you can put them in a garage or shed but you don’t want to let them get really cold - as in deep freeze. A guideline is that you can use the refrigerator (and you can) for this but not the freezer. The important thing is to ensure the 14-16 weeks of cold.

Timing Those Blooms

Approximately 21-25 days before you want to see potted tulip flowers next spring, you bring them into the warmth and start the process all over again. I note this include the hugging and kissing that started the entire thing but that’s as far as this family column will go. The growing instructions are here, you’re on your own for the rest of it.

Hedychium ‘Tahitian Flame’

I have this variegated-leaf Ginger in a pot on my front porch but alas, it doesn’t have this bloom on it. In fact, I’ve never been able to get this tender plant to bloom. I go away for the winter and this plant languishes in my basement where it is simply too cold for it. It also gets a tad on the dry side as well. It starves and struggles all winter and when I bring it out to the sunlight in the spring, it (and I) are happy it’s still alive.

I took this picture at Terra Nova Nursery out in Portland in their trial gardens. I won’t say I was jealous of their fragrant blooms. I won’t say that I lusted after the plant (I have it after all) but what I will say is if this is how it’s going to look, I’m going to take very good care of the plant this winter and I’m going for the big blooms next year myself. Nice flower, nice fragrance.

I note this bulb grows in just about any light exposure - from full sun to full shade but is only hardy to USDA zone 8 (I really have to get a Southern garden).

Another Fall Online Order

I went to Fraser’s Thimble Farm as well to see what was on offer out there in BC this fall. And I filled up my order from this small specialist plant nursery. Check ‘em out - I think you’re going to like the plants.

Now - this is a small family nursery and I don’t expect the same level of Net-service as I do from the big retailers. (Ever notice how the smaller the operation - the more idiosyncratic the owners - and the more interesting range of plants?)

And I wasn’t surprised. No online ordering forms, no credit card taking. An online catalog (oh yeah, can you drool over those plant descriptions because there’s no pictures) for a plant nut who has to look stuff up before ordering (they warn you about this). This is not for beginners. This is for those who would be serious gardeners.

As a would-be serious gardener, I ordered.

Mind you, I sent in the order via email and now I have to figure out how to get my credit card number to them to complete the transaction. They only open their email every few days (preferring fax - but I don’t own one of those anymore) so we’ll see how this goes. Why not put my order in over the phone - well, because they don’t take phone orders.

So here’s a company that puts a ton of stuff in the way of you placing your order yet I still ordered. Go figure. Mind you, the prices for the bulbs I wanted from these folks were lower than Garden Import and the service charge appears to be a one-stop price so while the order total was higher (I couldn’t resist adding just a few other bulbs to my order) the shipping is far less.

They ship to Canada and the U.S. (but US gardeners will require a few extra bucks because of your phytosanitary and security issues for permits).

I’ll be reporting on the quality of plants from both of my orders this fall when they arrive.

And if you’ll excuse me, now I really have to get my garden-building going.

First Yellow Tulip of 2008

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Daffodil Classes

I just posted a brand new video about Daffodil classes right here. This video explains the different flower forms and shows you pictures of each form. So if you ever wanted to know what kind of daffodil you were looking at, (so you could find it to plant yourself of course) here’s the starting point.

Tropical Plant Beauties

Here’s another of my friends with her “guest blog” for you to enjoy. You might want to check out her ongoing stories here.

Honey, after seven Wisconsin winters, I thought I had seen every kind of weather the planet spews, from hurricanes to blizzards. But, two feet of snow and -15ºF nights followed by a 50-degree-day that spawned frozen fog thick enough to cut into blocks are testing my Southern serenity. I might as well be back in the bayous of Louisiana, where sulfur fog obscures oil refinery pollution and muffles crying nutrias. At least, I wouldn’t be chilled to the bone as I am now, despite my mink coat and endless cups of Earl Grey tea spiked with peach brandy.

My precious tropical beauties are keeping me from going totally mad, especially the 14-pound amorphophallus bulb in the sunroom. Its passion-pink bud tantalizes me, knowing that it will burst forth in a month or two with the smelliest flower on the planet. ‘Konjac’, the cultivar I’ve been growing in the garden during our brief summers for the last four years, is the little cousin of giant ‘Titan’, the one television news crews like to cover when it blooms for a sensational blurb for the 6 p.m. news. Mine will produce the same cheap-vinyl-car-seat-cover purple spathe (Tony Avent’s description, not mine) atop a snakeskin mottled-burgundy and chartreuse stem, followed by a three-foot-high violet spadix that unfurls for only 12 hours. It reeks like rotten fish to attract carrion flies, its normal pollinator. They usually feed off of dead ‘gators and cows mired in the swamp.

I can hardly wait for the bud to break dormancy. Any harbinger of spring, especially one of this enormity cannot come too soon. It’s snowing again!
Love,
M’Liz