Tulip Dispatch – Lessons in Farming

We were super excited to offer our members (for the very first time!) local tulips grown by Farmer Becca. For us, this seemed like a fantastic opportunity to test run a new product while supporting a local, organic farm. We think it is important to work with our farmers while they experiment with new crops that improve their farming system.

Be sure to read below for more on that from Becca!

While we think this is an exciting product, we were not 100% impressed with the quality of all the tulips. The tulips were a mix of flowers with some looking great, some opening and dropping petals quicker than we expected and the total yield was less than expected meaning less flowers for customers. Because of this, we’ve decided to credit your account $10.00.

It’s hard to know what to expect when you try something for the first time, but we still think it’s important to try!

We hope you and your family were able to enjoy them and we are excited about what’s in store for next year. Our team is already working on our plans for 2023 and what we can improve on from this year. We plan to offer tulips again as well as other flower varieties in the future!

A Note From Farmer Becca

We decided to grow these tulips in the fall of 2021. In the last five years I have built four high tunnels, protected growing spaces where I grow directly in the soil under a metal and plastic structure. Growing in the high tunnels ensures I have control over when it rains (aka when I irrigate), what insects are allowed in (pests are never welcome!) and they help to extend the growing season by warming the soil in the spring and keeping the fall frosts from damaging the plants. The amount of produce I can grow in these spaces is tremendous! I can grow up to 10x the amount of marketable produce in the high tunnel as I can in the field.

It is tempting to grow only highly profitable crops here, such as tomatoes, peppers, or cucumbers. However, it is particularly important to rotate the crops. If you only grow these crops year after year, soon you will have disease build up, overwintering pests in the soil, and soil devoid of nutrients that these crops “mine”. By rotating crops through the tunnel, we can decrease our pest and disease susceptibility and keep our soil healthy.

When we were planning which crops we could integrate into our cropping system, a friend suggested tulips. I am a vegetable farmer, not a flower farmer, so at first, I laughed it off! But as I thought about it, tulips fit all our needs. It is fall planted for an early spring harvest; it shares no pests with our common cash crops; most of the nutrients the tulip uses come from the bulb itself and does not deplete the soil of nutrients and they are beautiful!

We bought our bulbs from Holland and planted them in the fall after our tomatoes came out of the tunnel. This spring we interplanted radishes in between the tulip rows. When the tulips came up, we carefully dug up each bulb with a shovel once we saw the first hint of color on the petals. Our harvest season was four weeks. When the sun was out, that meant harvesting 3 times a day! If it was cloudy, only one time a day, or if it was cloudy and cold, we got a break. Once they were harvested, we put them in our humidified walk-in cooler where they sat until it was time to send them to you. We made bouquets with the bulbs still on for optimum shelf life. Once we delivered them to TC Farm, TC Farm took them out of the refrigerator and cut the bulbs off, encouraging them to fully ripen and open.

We have learned a tremendous amount about growing tulips.

1. They are a great companion crop to grow in our tunnels, and we hope to fine tune our system to continue offering tulips next spring.
2. Tulip harvest is a time commitment. This year we planted 9 different varieties with 2-3 colors per variety, all which bloomed at various times. Next year we hope to plant 3 colors of one variety to streamline our harvest. It will allow us to anticipate and know the ripeness signals of the tulips to ensure they get harvested at the right time.
3. We gave our tulips ample space, which meant that the tulips had no lack of any nutrients. While this sounds like a great nurturing growing environment, florists want them to compete for sunlight and nutrients, so that they reach up towards the sun (thus, elongating their stem).
4. We are so grateful to TC Farm members (you!) who help support us to try new crops and push the boundaries of what is possible in our growing system!

Thank you!

Becca and Seeds Farm Crew