Tulips

I'm here again!

I have five pots with tulips in and want to make use of the containers when the tulips have been and gone (i.e., June onwards) without damaging the tulip bulbs for future years.
I would love to sprinkle in some wildflower seeds; is this possible, if I top up the pots with more soil? Will the tulips flower as normal the following year?

Thanks,

Phil.

 

Hi phillip

Tulips in pots tend to flower quite badly the second year as if they are not planted deep enough they tend to split into smaller bulbs that will not flower well for a couple of years. Your best bet is to wait til the foliage dies down then plant them in the garden or just treat them as annuals and bin them.

Let me know what you will do with them as it would be good to see

Tnd

 

will tulips come back again and again and is it normal that they don't come up the first year?

 

Yes

absolutely not :( Mice?

 

Thats interesting - I didn't know that was why they split. My tulips in pots certainly split a lot and never get back to the size they were when I bought them. I lift them after flowering and replant them all together again in pots in the autumn. They still do fairly well, but there will be non bloomers in there as well.

Tulips are certainly perennial as Kristen said - but they can have a tendency to die off over time. It was a long while before I realised why people like Christopher Lloyd (Great Dixter) said to lift Tulips after flowering. They come from central Asia, where the summers are very hot and very dry. To survive they learnt to go dormant over this period. But our summers are wet, consequently they have a tendency to rot over the summer during their dormant period. They are growing, of course, over the winter - so a wet winter is no problem. The idea of lifting them is to keep them dry over the summer - though you could just put your pots under cover.

I understand that the smaller species Tulips tend to be more resilient - and I leave these in the ground, but I lift my other Tulips. A lot of show gardens and big houses just grow them as annuals. But that sounds expensive and wasteful to me.

 

Just one more point on Tulips , the name comes from Turkish for turban . They were first cultivated around the area of Turkey. They were highly prized in Europe and a single bulb could cost a years wage ! In fact the high cost was named as Tulip mania in the early 1600's . You can buy a bag of lovely bulbs in the £1 shop now !

 

I have a couple of books on Tulipomania in Holland in the 1630's. Its a fascinating insight into human behaviour. It was all caused by Holland, who had 50% of the world's merchant shipping and trade at the time, and so had a massive increase in the money supply - which invariably leads to a bubble and then to a crash. Its so similar to the South Sea Bubble of 1720, the 1929 crash, and the recent 2007 crash. All caused by excessive money supply.

So what are we doing today - furiously increasing the money supply to try to solve our problems.

The next crash could be the serious one.