10 Tips for More Tulip Profits
I shared this list on our public Instagram channel and was surprised by how many people found it helpful, so I want to make sure it has a spot here, too. This is an extra post for this week.
I occasionally hear people say that they feel tulips aren’t a profitable crop. Here are 10 things we do that help ensure they’re not living rent free on our farm!
1. We only buy wholesale bulbs. Retail companies who say they’re offering “wholesale bulk prices” are still charging more than true wholesale. So when you feel those ads for “wholesale bulbs” or bulk bulbs at wholesale prices — know that they are probably STILL charging more for them. Take a moment, send an application to a wholesale company. See if you’re missing out. Plus: you’re probably paying sales tax on retail purchases.
2. We only buy wholesale bulbs in bulk, a minimum of 500 per variety. When you order smaller quantities (even wholesale), you pay more. There’s a markup for the extra work and packaging of smaller quantities. Resist the urge! Do some quick math and see if the price per bulb is more at the lower quantity being offered to you. And consider this: when you order a 100-pack of bulbs, that’s just 10 bunches of tulips, if every one blooms well for you. 100 stems really isn’t much. I know it can be tempting to order smaller quantities of more varieties, but think hard about how that will affect your profit.
3. We import HIGH QUALITY bulbs so there is less loss from the start. We also offer them wholesale 😉, to growers across the U.S. & Canada. Tulip bulbs can be diseased or damaged on arrival for a number of different reasons. Retail suppliers know their buyers are uninformed and don’t know what to look for. They also sell their bulbs for months in warm box stores. The storage is poor. Higher cost + lower quality = retail bulbs.
Many wholesale suppliers simply re-label and pass on the exact crates of bulbs they receive. They trust that few of us will complain and ask for refunds if there are problems. And there often are. That’s why we started our own bulb company. We chose to take a different route. We manually inspect all of our bulbs and remove the bad ones and replace them from extra crates we use as part of our cost. We want our buyers to know that we offer a reliable, high quality product.
4. We grow tulips over a long season so they don’t all blow open over the same couple weeks. We have less loss this way and we earn more per stem in the “off season”. Check out @thetulipworkshop
5. We expedite our field plantings using a “dump and spread” method. We don’t waste time (labor $) setting every bulb upright with perfect spacing between them in field plantings. Tulips find their way up. It’s a beautiful thing. Let them do some of the work. We use trench plantings. We haven’t bought into the raised bed craze. That money for lumber and labor to build frames AND money for soil or growing medium and labor to fill beds.
6. We make sure we properly water our tulips (they like a lot of water) & vent any tunnels we plant them in. It’s easy to lose tulips to disease, excess heat, too much humidity, & under watering if you ignore them. We plant ours in caterpillar tunnels and we open them on sunny days.
7. We harvest tulips at the proper stage for a long vase life. You’ll probably have to harvest a few times a day to make sure you’re not letting any go too long. Single tulips can be harvested when they are just barely opening at the tips. We harvest double tulips when the outer petals are pulling away from the center and some of the flower is colored up. Many new growers wait too long.
8. We don’t harvest and store tulips on the bulb. Tulips have a long vase life and keeping them on the bulb in dry storage means that you’ll have to take even more time to rehydrate them later. Time is $! We harvest and process them in the same sitting and store them fresh cut in buckets with cold, clean water close to freezing. You can store them for weeks at a time this way.
9. When harvesting soil planted tulips, we keep a couple of dry hand towels nearby & simply wipe the soil off the stems. We don’t waste time washing them when wiping works just as well and is faster for us.
10. We try not to store tulips for long periods of time for certain sales down the road. A sale is a sale. Move them as quickly as you can to prevent loss. If your flowers are blooming early, try to sell them early. Other flowers will likely bloom early behind them, anyways. I try to keep this advice in my head: “if you’re using your cooler, you’re already losing.”
Let me know if you have any questions.