Garden Blog - Blog Post

Last-Minute Tulips

4 comments

Well, I’ve had the most wonderful two weeks on the beautiful sub-tropical paradise island of Maderia. The holiday meant that things have gotten rather behind on here so there’s some catching up to do. I should also expand on the context and story behind some of the holiday gallery images in future posts. It has suddenly turned cold back home in recent days and one thing I do not appreciate is returning from a comfortable 24°C to 0°C.

One thing I will appreciate (albeit in spring) are the three pots of tulips I planted just before the holiday. Earlier in the year I said I wasn’t going to do tulips but I caved in, especially when I saw them at reduced price and know the other half likes them. I thought I could turn that into a cheap favour to store up for future use and simultaneously benefit from bold spring colour.

The bulbs are sharing the same pots as the Saffron Crocus (which can be seen just emerging) and those pots aren’t particularly deep so they could be grown as just annuals. There was a bit of hassle with carefully extracting the crocus, refreshing the compost, adding fertiliser, planting the tulips and then putting the crocus back and trying to convince them that they’d never moved. I’m not sure it’s worked.

Since I planted the tulips over a fortnight ago, I’ve forgotten what I bought. I know I have these two:

  1. Tulipa “Burgundy” – dark wine red – late spring
  2. Tulipa “Tricolette” – creamy yellow with a splash of red – early spring
There are also another two types but I can’t remember what they are and I’ve since lost the receipt so it will be a surprise when they appear in the spring. When I was choosing the tulips I forgot that – like potatoes – you can have early flowering, late flowering etc varieties and I have planted complementary colours in each pot but one might be early and the other might be late, so they might miss each other, which isn’t the effect I was going for. We’ll just have to wait and see.

 

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Sunil Patel

I'm Sunil Patel, this is me. I created the Garden at 13 Broom Acres and I open it to visitors. I also bake and write blog posts giving a "behind the scenes" look into what it's like to maintain such a garden.

Visit the blog, then come and visit the garden. We can have a good sit-down, a jolly chinwag and a relaxing cup of tea with a sinfully generous slice of home made cake.

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4 comments

gardeninacity 06/12/2012 - 9:54 pm

Good move! You can never have too many tulips.

Reply
Sunil 10/12/2012 - 8:33 pm

I think it might turn out to be an annual thing as tulips are always being sold off at silly prices in Autumn that I don’t think I should bother resisting. We’ll have to see how the display looks in spring.

Reply
Jean 27/12/2012 - 1:44 am

Sunil, I also made a last-minute decision to plant tulips in a big container; when spring comes, I think I will be very happy that I did — as I imagine you will be too.

Reply
Sunil 27/12/2012 - 7:36 pm

Hi Jean, I do hope they will come out. We’ve had so much rain recently that they’ll be floating out if it continues as it has been doing.

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