Growing Tulips
The single most important bit of advice is to grow the leaves and not the flowers
This means that your job is to do a good job of growing the leaves, and the flowers will take care of themselves. Do not cut off the leaves of tulips until they are yellow and fading!
The leaves of this plant are responsible for taking sunlight – turning it into energy and
sending that energy down to the bulb so the bulb can produce another flower bud. If you cut off the leaves before they have done their job, the bulb will not have produced another flower bud. You may find you get leaves the following year but no flowers.
Growing tulips is easy if you let the tulip tell you when to remove the leaves. When the leaves go yellow – you can cut them off. Not before!
Yes I know that sometimes you want to plant annuals and the darn tulips are still growing. The solution to this is to only plant early tulips and they’ll be done by the time annual planting is supposed to happen. Late tulips will always be in the way.
Yes, I know that you don’t like the look of tulip leaves and you want to tie them up. Tying them up only means the leaves will take longer to gather energy (they don’t do so well if their leaves are not spread out collecting the sunshine).
Tulips love to be fed so do throw a shovel of compost on each tulip cluster in your garden in early spring before they start growing (or late fall).
Tulips do not like to be watered in the summer time Tulips come from an area that is naturally very not and dry during summer months. They want to be hot and dry. If you water them (because you’re watering the rest of the garden) then expect them to resent this and rot. Watering is one of the silent killers – the tulips were fine one spring and disappear the next.
Feeding bonemeal is a waste of money I know that various writers have told you to feed your bulbs bonemeal but understand that phosphorus in the soil (that’s what bone meal is) is mostly immobile.If you put bonemeal on the garden it is going to stay where you put it. The fungal mass will eventually absorb it and make it available to surface roots but generally those roots of growing tulips are a long way down and won’t be able to benefit from it.
Planting tulips is covered in this general advice on planting bulbs I note that tulips don’t seem to care whether you plant them upside down or right-side up. They’ll grow fine in either case.
In generally, growing tulips is pretty easy and fun stuff. If you follow the directions above, you’ll be fine.
Click here to ask a question about growing tulips
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