Fall Tulips from the World of Color

Ask any avid gardener when tulip season is and they'll tell you--"Spring."   However, ask any tulip grower at Sun Valley the same question and they'll reply--"All year, baby!"

Our own Lane DeVries is a 4th generation tulip grower, and our iconic tulips are considered Sun Valley's "bread 'n butter."  This is because of our deep love for these flowers as well as our Fall Tulip Program which has ensured that YES we can have our cake and eat it too...all year long!


To show how we do this, we need to take a little trip around the world.

More beautiful photos of the Tulips of Holland here.

Northern Hemisphere Spring

Typically, our tulip bulbs come from the veritable homestead of tulips, the Netherlands.  Have you seen the striking photos of their countryside in springtime? Amazing.  Our Dutch partners grow fields and fields of color and allow the flowers to bloom out completely.  During this time, the leaves continue photosynthesizing energy from the sun, and all that energy returns to the bulb.  Those bulbs are then dug up, inspected, and shipped to us.

We receive the dormant bulbs at the end of October, plant them in our rich soil, and store them in coolers where they begin to root.  As their roots become established and small sprouts form, we move them into "winter" coolers.  This cold environment arrests their development and they go into hibernation. When Spring comes, we are able to pull the crates into the greenhouse on a rotating schedule that ensures we will be picking fresh tulips every week.

                    Baby tulip sprouts || Tulips in the Greenhouse

Depending on your location and winter temperatures, this is the same process tulips go through if you were to plant them in your garden during the Fall season... they root in Fall, hibernate in Winter, and come Springtime they begin to emerge and show some serious color.  It is their natural rhythm.

 So what do you do if you want to grow tulips year-round? You flip the switch! This means we go to the opposite hemisphere for our Fall Tulip bulbs--New Zealand.  There is quite a history between New Zealand and Holland, which began way back in the 1600s, but the exciting floral exchange occurred during the Dutch migration and contributions of the 1950's, which included Friesian cows and, of course, marvelous tulips.

Friesian cows and tulips

Southern Hemisphere Spring

Using bulbs from the Southern Hemisphere, we mirror our Fall Program to look like Spring.  Six months prior to fall, our partners "down under" ship freshly-dormant bulbs by boat to foggy, coastal California.  When they arrive, we plant them in soil, let them root, and then hibernate in "winter" coolers (and all of this is happening during OUR summer!).  When Fall arrives in California, we place crates of rooted bulbs in the greenhouse, which then act as if it were springtime (and it is in their birthplace!).  So even though these Southern Hemisphere Tulips are in our Northern Hemisphere Fall, they are bursting with vigor of spring, and ready to go.

 

Having the coolers full of rooted, hibernating tulips gives us amazing control.  We are able to bring them into the greenhouse in a staggered rotation, which allows us to pick the colors and varieties that are in-demand per season. The best part, however, is that we can have tulips all-year, with no lapses in production.   

Tulips in differing stages of growth

   
We are now smack-dab in the middle of harvesting these soil-grown, Southern Hemisphere beauties, and this will continue through the holidays!




So take a trip around the World-of-Color with us, and share in the bounty of spring quality tulips right now.