I picked the first of our tulips yesterday! This is the very beginning of the season, and to be fair, they were from bulbs that were left in the ground from last year’s plantings. Also to be fair, they were delightfully tiny! We have about 8,000 of these pretties (with proper length stems) coming very soon. If you want us to deliver a bunch of these each week to your doorstep, be quick and order yours, there are a few subscriptions left. Check out the website to order a subscription for you or to give as a gift.
Did you know that tulips are harvested with their bulbs attached? Most flower farmers treat them as annuals, and replant new bulbs each year. The bulbs will grow flowers again, but it can take a few years to get a decent stem length back. When the tulip craze hit the world though, in the early 1600s, none of us flower farmers would have been tossing our bulbs in the compost after flowering. From a BBC article I read:
One of the curiosities of the 17th Century tulip market was that people did not trade the flowers themselves but rather the bulbs of scarce and sought-after varieties. The result, as Dash points out, was “what would today be called a futures market”. Tulips even began to be used as a form of money in their own right: in 1633, actual properties were sold for handfuls of bulbs.
Interestingly, in the world of breeding tulips a virus originally caused the striated effect (feathery or flame-like patterns) that we now think is so beautiful.