Growing Tulips: How to Plant a Bulb and Not Poison It Before Spring
My father planted tulips every fall for maybe twenty years. He never measured them, never read instructions, just stuck the bulbs in with his thumb a span deep and that was it. In the spring, the yard would light up with color while I, with all my diligence and purchased manuals, wondered why mine came out weak or not at all.
It turned out that I was wrong about something fundamental, and from the very beginning.
Plant the bulb when you are too lazy to go outside
October, November – when the evenings are already biting and the last thing you want to do is dig in cold soil. Right then. If you plant earlier, while the ground is warm, the bulb starts growing immediately and freezes in the winter. I did it like this one September — in a hurry, because I had a free afternoon — and in the spring, four out of twenty bulbs showed up. The rest had simply rotted underground.
The ideal soil temperature is below 10 degrees. I’ve never used a thermometer for this — I look at it more simply: if the car has frozen over two or three times in the morning and I’m already looking for a thicker jacket, then the time has come.
There’s a rough rule of thumb for depth that works
You take the bulb, see how thick it is, and dig three times as deep. My dad used to explain it as “the size of a fist,” and for some reason that worked better than centimeters — the big ones go about 15, the smaller ones 10, but a difference of one or two centimeters in one direction is not a disaster. My dad aimed intuitively and hit the mark, I measured and somehow I was always wrong in one direction or the other.
The flat side goes down, the pointed tip goes up. It sounds obvious, but I’ve seen people turn them over—including myself on a dark November morning with a coffee in one hand.
Soil and drainage are more than half the battle
Tulips don’t like waterlogging around the bulb. Clayey, heavy soil is almost certain death—the bulb rots slowly and quietly, and you don’t realize it until spring, when everyone else around you is already blooming. If your yard is clayey, mix in sand and compost before planting. It’s not difficult, just requires a little effort before you put in the first bulb.
Water after planting—once, thoroughly. Then you let winter do its thing. It knows.
There are gaps between varieties
Some tulips bloom in early March, others wait until late April. If you want your yard to be in bloom for a month and a half without interruption, mix early and late varieties when planting—something I learned from a catalog, but my father had been doing for years, simply because he bought from different places and didn’t sort.
Again, he turned out to be right without knowing why.
