Tulip Season!
Hello friends! I am trying something new and writing this blog post from my phone as I walk around the farm doing work. Meaning I am using talk to text!
A handful of you who are close to me already know that this is basically how I live my life from the moment the farm opens in the early spring to the final day outside in November. I will do my best to correct any spelling errors, but I figured I would just introduce you to life on the farm, which is going to involve grammatical errors.
Tulip season started early this year, or rather earlier than last year, so I thought I would show you quickly how we harvest tulip bulbs for cut flower production. Up the road at the big tulip festival farms, they are growing for bulb production, so they are not interested in the flowers, except for to sell you tickets to come and look at them. I am not selling bulbs that I grow here on this farm (I sell the bulbs that they are growing up the road as a retailer), so I harvest them a little differently.
If you look closely at those photographs, you will see that all of the leaves on a tulip are generated from that primary stem. The reason we pull the bulb out is that in order for the bulb to recharge for next year‘s flower, it has to have three or four leaves still on it acting as solar panels. If I were to cut the flower off of the stem, leaving three or four leaves, my customers would end up with a 4 inch stem.
By the time I get a bulb in stock here, it already has two seasons of growth under its belt. It has maybe three more seasons left in it before it runs out of energy, and no amount of summer sunshine can recharge it. Unlike daffodils, tulips won’t naturalize and spread all over the place, so there is a very specific bulb growing process that allows you to get bulbs from me, from the big box stores, from the garden stores, etc. Your cut flower farmers will treat them as annuals and purchase new bulb stock every single year to plant or to sell.
Ideally, I pull the whole stem out with the bulb when it is just starting to show a little bit of its final color, because I want my customers to have as much time with those flowers as possible, including the time that they mature into their full bloom. A fun fact about tulips is that they will continue to grow in the vase of water so you will end up with flowers that are an inch to 2 inches longer at the end of their bloom cycle than they were when you first got them.
I just pulled these three crates of flowers and will probably pull another three crates before the day is out because at this point they color up so quickly that I can barely leave the farm to go on a dump run before it’s time to harvest again. Not a terrible problem to have!
So that’s it! That’s our first talk to text blog post and I’m very excited about It creating new, useful content, for all of you is very important to me, and I want to really take you behind the scenes. I am going to try and figure out how to do video from the farm while I’m working that doesn’t require extra steps of going inside and uploading it, etc. But first I have tulips to harvest.
