Receiving Tulip Bulbs

It’s fall and that means tulip time for flower farmers! There are few good things to keep in mind to protect you, your bulbs, and your invest in tulip bulbs.

HANDLING SUGGESTIONS:

We recommend that you handle tulip bulbs with gloves on. Similar to hyacinth (and many other plants, actually) tulips can cause a form of contact dermatitis for people who handle them frequently. We keep nitrile gloves on hand here for people who are working with bulbs.

Bulb Storage:

We recommend that you store your untreated (not pre-cooled) bulbs in a cool dry place like a flower cooler or garage until you can plant them. This should not be a long-term storage solution. It is just a holding place for your bulbs until you get them into the ground— hopefully within a week or two. Bulbs are perishable and should not be stored in warm places. If you do this, you risk something called “warming in transit” between harvest and planting. This warming confuses the bulb into prematurely thinking it is spring time. Bulbs that esperience “warming in transit” may not grow at all.

Bulb Quality:

When you’re working with a high volumes of small perishable products, it can be expected for a few of those bulbs or seeds to be bad. Generally, as growers we tolerate up to 15-20 bad per 500 (one full bulb crate of a single variety). That is a 96% success rate. If you are looking at a pack of seeds and see a 96% germination rate, you’d be pretty happy with that.

Why are some bulbs bad— well— it’s really difficult to find bad ones when you are looking at millions of bulbs. Most larger companies use machines with pre-set parameters, like weight or size to sort bulbs. They just can’t catch every single one.

We do manual inspections of our wholesale bulbs and even we don’t catch every single bulb that might be bad, but we try. Our goal is to lower the spoiled rate and be below the industray standard.

What makes a bulb bad?

Fusarium infections make up the vast majority of the problems we see in tulip bulbs. You can identify them by bulbs that feel almost weightless. They may be powdery to the touch or hollow feeling.

Collect these bulbs (by the variety). Take a photo and a video of them if you have more than 15-20 bulbs per 500 and feel compelled to seek a refund from your supplier. Note: A refund for 20 bulbs is probably about $6. If you have widespread problems, it can be worth reporting, but I always try to balance the affect of requesting a small refund with the trouble it brings the person on the other end. Bulbs are in high demand, and (prior to starting our own bulb company) I always worked to be pleasant customer. I can think of only one time, (we received a full crate of bad bulbs) that I actually when back to my supplier and requested a credit.

Occasionally, you may see some blue mold or surface mold on bulbs. Generally that goes away with planting. We have not seen any mold like this so far this season.

Bulb Jackets:

Tulip varieties differ in their ability to hold on to their jackets (or tunics) through harvesting, sorting, and shipping. Some varieties just lose their jackets more easily. There is nothing wrong with a bulb that has no jacket. In this case, the white flesh of the bulb is exposed to the different machinery involved in harvesting, sorting, and shipping. The white part of the bulb may show signs of mechanical damage (bruising) in this case. That can look like tan or brown nicks/spots, etc. It looks similar to a lightly toasted marshmallow. The white flesh can also show signs of being on or near bulbs that are emitting ethylene gas from fusarium infections. In this case you may see what look like brown scabs or cancres on the exposed white flesh. But even these marks do not mean your plant has been compromised.

Questionable Bulbs:

If there are bulbs that you are uncertain about, we recommend that you plant them together in plots and see what happens. Chances are good, these bulbs will perform fine for you. The possible income from the sale of the cut flowers is more than a refund for a bulb that isn’t terrible, and you might save your bulb rep the trouble of taking time to look into something unnecessarily.