Tulips: A Winter Crop with Bellingham History

Tulip season has started on our flower farm!

We are bringing tulips to market a month earlier than last year!

While we don’t yet have heat plumbed in our greenhouse, we got lucky with a warmer winter in forcing our crated tulips.

We filled bulb crates with 2” of bulb mix, planted each with around 70 bulbs (like eggs in a carton), and topped them off with 4-6” more mix. We used a peat/pumice combo after learning last year that perlite can burn tulip plants in our small trial last year.

From there, crates got watered in and then rooted in cool, dark conditions for a while! Supposedly bulbs take 2 weeks to root and then can go into the cooler to finish their cooling requirement - around a couple months for 9C bulbs and 0 weeks to a month for 5C bulbs (each variety differs in weeks of cooling needed).

Not yet having our larger cooler complete or greenhouse heat, we were grateful for no plummeting temps as the crates sat stacked on pallets and tarped in the cold barn for 1-2 months before pushing up. The key is having a well-formed mat of roots!

Once foliage was pushing up, we moved the tulips into the tunnel. They got minimal heating on nights where temps got below freezing, but otherwise went unheated. More heat would have made them bloom MUCH FASTER, but we will take what we can get and have the infrastructure to be able to program these flowers much better and earlier - think local Valentine’s Day Flowers!

Some fun local tulip history:

The Skagit Tulip Festival used to be held in Bellingham! Established in 1908, the Tulip Festival established Bellingham as THE Tulip Town by the 1920’s, complete with parade and tens of thousands of visitors. Some very cold weather a couple years and the great depression led to the festival moving south, but that didn’t stop our local flower festival from evolving into the Blossom Time Festival in the 40s and eventually into Ski to Sea.