By Paula Baxter Mill Pond Flower Farm

Do You need tulips? Hmm, here’s our thoughts on that one…

At Mill Pond Flower Farm our main customers are wedding and event florists. They need particular colours and shapes for specific dates. Tulips are a lovely flower to have, but it’s very hard to predict when they’ll flower so whether they’ll be available for their orders. They’re also very readily available through wholesalers, although they’re not the same as locally grown. We allow the blooms to grow to their full size and they’re fully coloured when delivered. We do sell some local flowers but very limited numbers, although we always have brides ordering buckets of mixed blooms to arrange themselves in the spring.

When it came to bulb ordering time, last year for the first time ever I really hesitated over spending hundreds of pounds on tulips. I consulted the oracle that is the Flowers from the Farm forum and asked what other growers thought about growing tulips. The response was thoughtful but mixed, between growers who don’t grow them (too expensive, not a good return) to those who couldn’t imagine spring without them. I decided not to go for tulips that year and I bought a whole load of hellebores instead.

Fast forward to last week.

We no longer offer retail bouquets and bunches and Mother’s Day is on March 10, so too early for our flowers. Our main markets are now wholesale to florists and our own weddings. How many tulips do I need? Can I get away with not ordering them? Well, there are weddings booked in already, in April and the possibility of one in late March. A decision made to order some, but mainly the more perennial varieties at the lower end of the price spectrum. The tulips are outnumbered by more reliable hyacinth, fritillary and some extra fancy narcissus.

At Plantpassion our customers are far more retail based. We sell lots of flower arrangers buckets, Friday flowers, and also sell to shop florists who sell to the public locally. Our Customers love tulips, in bright colours, and that are different to those available from the supermarkets. So I go for Doubles, Parrot tulips, Viridiflora and really tall cottage types.

Tulips enable us to get the season going with a lot of bright colours and fanfare, but they are a difficult crop as they need harvesting every day, especially if we get unseasonably warm weather when you can get a glut. This year i’ll be aiming for about the same as last year - 6000 tulips, which i’ll plant in the polytunnel, in raised beds and on the field to get as long a period of flowering as possible.

In 2024 we’re likely to miss both Mother’s Day and Easter with our tulips, so choosing a mix of varieties that will take us through April for our Friday flowers is my main focus.

At Carol’s Garden, we mainly sell wholesale flowers and DIY buckets destined for weddings and events. So tulips are an important part of our spring mix, but not as important (or profitable) as anemones and ranunculus. I order under 2000 tulips, 1/3 planted in the tunnel and I choose mainly early doubles, good colours in Darwin hybrids and triumph, and a few fringed for that prime space. In whatever colours I think will be popular for weddings. Then the rest are outdoors, including the later and more weather-resistant varieties. This gives me a long picking season from mid March to End April.

Mother’s Day is also a good market for me and means I can use the smaller quantities of other flowers to mix with a backbone of tulips, anemones and evergreen foliage. If Mother’s Day is before Mid March, I can usually get the early single tulips ready for then. Any earlier, and I won’t bother planting so many of those varieties as they’re not so popular for weddings.

With all these things on our mind, Out come the catalogues and the order are put in, hundreds (or thousands) of bulbs are on their way. We just have to plant them – oh, I may not have mentioned that bulb planting is our least favourite job - roll on the spring and lots and lots of tulips!