Tulips

Planting Tulip & Narcissus Bulbs at the Johnny's Research Farm

We're planting our fall bulbs at the Johnny's Research Farm, and I'm here today to just give a quick demonstration of how we plant tulips and daffodils for cut flower and for home garden use.

Planting Tulips for Cut Flower Use

For tulips for cut flower use, we treat them as an annual flower. And so we plant them very densely in a deep trench. You can see this trench that we have dug here. We typically dig 20 to 24 inches wide and 8 to 10 inches deep, and we space the bulbs very close together because we are only growing them as an annual. And we want to use space as efficiently as possible.

We're spacing these bulbs really close together, almost touching. We're getting about ten bulbs across this trench. We would just continue like this all the way down the trench with as many tulip bulbs as we have. And so this type of planting will give a really dense stand of tulips. And then this is common for tulips, for cut flower production grown outside.

Planting Daffodils for Cut Flower Use

For planting daffodils for cut flower use, we take a similar approach to tulips. We plant them in a trench. We dig the trench 20 to 24 inches wide and 8 to 10 inches deep. But the main difference between tulip and daffodil plantings for cut flowers is that the daffodils we treat as a perennial; daffodils perennialize much more reliably than tulips do. We can harvest off of these plants for cut flowers for many years. In order to facilitate that, we need to give the bulbs a little bit more space. We use a wider spacing for daffodil bulbs than we do for tulip bulbs. Typically with daffodil bulbs we leave 2 to 4 inches between bulbs in the bed for cut flower use. This will hopefully give these bulbs enough room to expand over the next few years.

We'll be able to harvest off of them for several seasons. You can see, when I mentioned the bulbs expanding, you can already see how that is starting to happen or what that will look like. This bulb already has a kind of a side bulb forming off of this. As these plants stay in the ground year after year, this side bulb will increase in size and eventually become large enough that it will produce a flower as well. That's part of the reason we're just giving these more space here right now.

Dividing Daffodils

Another thing to know about daffodils, if you're growing them either for cut flower use or in the home garden landscape, eventually they will continue to increase in size and may need to be dug up and divided at some point.

If you notice that your daffodil planting is maybe declining a little bit in vigor or if you're noticing that the stems are getting thinner, blooms are getting smaller, and it's been several years since they've been in the ground, that's a sign that they might be getting too crowded, and you might want to dig that planting up, divide the bulbs and replant some of them somewhere else. That can be done ideally in the early summer, after the plants have flowered, after the foliage has died back and the bulbs have started to kind of dry down in the ground, that's a good time to dig them up and and move them around.

Planting Daffodils & Tulips for Perennializing

For both tulips and daffodils, if you are growing them in a home, garden or landscape capacity and you want them to perennialize, using a little bit wider spacing is recommended, up to six inches between bulbs, depending on your design. This will help to ensure that the bulbs will have space to grow as time goes on.

It will also help provide good airflow from year to year, as those plants are in the landscape and will help to minimize disease pressure. So one more thing that we think about when we're planting in a trench planting like this, is that we try to make the trenches even as possible to try and place the bulbs on a flat surface.

We also try to make sure that the soil at the base of the trench isn't too densely packed, which can be a little tricky when digging it out. And you know, we're definitely walking in it as we're digging it and fine tuning it. However, we try to go back through with a rake or something like that to kind of loosen up the soil at the base so that that the bulbs have a little bit of a looser soil to start rooting into.

We've found that that seems to facilitate better rooting than if we're placing them on a really hard packed soil at the base of the trench. So that's just one more thing that we try to make sure in our trials that they're able to root into a little bit of a looser soil.

Cover With Soil

When you're done planting, bulbs can be covered over with soil. For tulips and daffodils, we typically cover with 6 to 8 inches of soil, and in general, though, planting a little too deep is better than planting too shallow. And then one other thing to consider for your planting location is to select a well-drained site for planting, avoiding low lying or poorly draining ground that might be prone to spring flooding or standing water.

That's just a quick little video about how we plant our tulip and daffodil trials here on the farm. Thanks for watching.

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