Timing Winter Tulip Bulb Forcing

Looking for flowers to fill the gap between your early forced tulip successions and spring flowers? Timing is everything to a bulb forcer, and fortunately, these flowers were designed to fit the bill.

Grow late blooming tulip varieties with 5C pre-cooling for the end of your winter successions, and then work in the earliest, fastest blooming varieties of bulbs that have been cooled more slowly over a longer period of time. These bulbs will have been marketed as “untreated” bulbs in the fall. By now, they’ve achieved much of their cooling in your own storage or here at our warehouse. Then growers can work with the untreated later blooming varieties in their forcing successions.

Here’s a simplified schedule that explains how and when the different bulb preparations we offer should be used:

Early 5C prepared tulips: These bulbs are prepared with pre-cooling and are prioritized in our shipping calendar to arrive to customers who want to try to achieve flowers in time for Christmas. We offer a limited range of varieties that are known to be good for this application. There’s never any guarantee that it will work, and the bulbs require optimal growing conditions and know-how, but this is the best chance for the earliest tulips and many of our growers love this offering.

5C prepared tulips: Most of our tulips sales fall into this category. We offer a range of varieties from quick turn Triumph tulips to later blooming varieties. These are great for harvest dates in January and February. They are also good for field planting in warm climates where pre-cooling is needed.

Untreated tulips: We offer “untreated” (non-cooled) tulips for field planting in cold climates and for late winter and early spring bulb forcing. Early blooming tulips, like Triumph tulips (with fewer required cooling weeks) can be used for blooms at the beginning of this forcing window and growers will find t’s easier to achieve later bloom times with the later blooming varieties that require more cooling weeks. “Untreated” bulbs can be planted upon receipt by the customer in the fall, or dry stored to achieve their “winter” before growing. We dry store our overstock “untreated” bulbs through the winter and offer drop shipping on them, too. Over time, they become “pre-cooled” bulbs as we help them achieve their winter prior to late season sales.

Double and single late 5C prepared bulbs and untreated bulbs used for forcing can help growers who struggle with gaps in their tulip production from around the end of February through to their natural field crops.

Some of our favorite late blooming varieties are:

Pink Star (later growing helps this variety grow taller)

Lambada

Foxtrot (later growing helps this variety grow taller)

‘Lambada’ shines in late season forcing successions and field plantings.