A Guide to Tulips Growing

Tulips come in many shapes and sizes and their wonderful colors bring joy to any garden. Tulips need to be planted in late fall or early winter for the best tulips growing. You need to plant them before the freezing weather because tulips need a cold period when they are dormant and resting between their shows. Alternatively, chill the bulbs in the refrigerator six to eight weeks before planting. When you transfer them to the ground, make sure you choose somewhere cool and deep, else they will heat up too quickly and might fail to flower.

You should ensure you choose the best quality tulip bulbs for successful tulips growing. If you fertilize the plantings every season and plant bulbs every few years, the results should be good.

Planting Tulips

Before planting your bulbs, work the ground well to about a foot in depth. Work in some manure, peat moss and compost if the soil is sandy or heavy. Wood ashes and bone meal are also good plant foods. You should use a couple of cups for every twenty bulbs. Planting depths depend on the soil but usually four to five inches is ideal for tulips growing. Make sure you place the bulbs pointed end first into the ground. Plant them about six inches away from each other because tulips look nicer is a group than individually. When you have planted the bulbs, water the ground well to settle the soil around them. Watering the plants early when the buds are rising can enhance the beauty of your tulips, making the stems taller and the heads bigger.

Caring for Growing Tulips

If the weather is severe, you should mulch the growing tulips after the first frost, with a good covering of grass clippings, pine boughs, leaves or straw. Remove this cover in early spring. If the weather is not too bad, the tulips won't need mulching.

If you don't cut all your tulips for an indoor display, you need to cut them when you notice them fading because seed pods will take food that would otherwise go to the bulb for the following year's flower growth. To get next year's tulips growing well, this is an important step.

Tulip Diseases

There are a number of diseases which can affect tulips. Blight causes brown flecks on the leaves and a tulip suffering with blight will often go gray after a couple of weeks. The flowers will go limp and become brown or gray. Infected bulbs should be burned so the disease doesn't spread.

Gray bulb rot can occur if the bulb is underground for too much time. If this happens in your tulip growing, the bulb will become too soggy to rise above the ground and your tulip will drown. Crown rot causes the bulb and flower to die but this is quite a rare problem in tulip growing.

Tulip growing is fairly easy as long as you are aware of how to take care of your growing tulips and the results are usually an amazing array of stunning, colorful flowers which everyone who sees your garden will admire!