What I’ve Learned This Spring
Gardening is like painting a picture, blindfolded. You can sketch and plan and measure, but no matter how well your plans are laid, you won’t truly know what you’ve painted until the first flower blooms; by then, well, what it is, it is.
Of all the creative pursuits I’ve undertaken, gardening is, by far, the most challenging, and the one I continue to fail at but still keep dusting myself off and trying again. Maybe that’s why it’s kept my attention so long; that, and the bountiful rewards when you do succeed.
This year is our first real attempt at growing flowers with the intention of selling them. We’ve grown tons of flowers in the past few years, but only for our own enjoyment and mostly the summer blooming kind. Since we’re currently planning to sell our honey and bee products at a local farmers market this summer, it seems only fitting that the source of our honey products make an appearance, the flowers.
Besides, anyone who knows me, knows I’m obsessed with flowers. Our furniture, walls, and decor reek of floral excess and I just can’t get enough of it! Perhaps I was a bee in a past life. It was inevitable that I would need to grow oodles of them for myself and what better excuse than a business enterprise involving flowers?!
Anyways, I want to tell you about my most recent garden fail. Tulips. I suppose in one sense it was a success, I grew a bunch of tulips, but besides that, my plans did not pan out. Here’s what I learned.
If you want to grow tulips, for cutting or ornamentals, purchase from a reputable source. I bought over 100 tulip bulbs. Half from two different sources. Half grew beautifully, Half never came up. I suppose I should have known, as the price difference was also about half as much, but the source seemed reliable at the time. Lesson learned, you get what you pay for.
In my zeal for flower bounty, I hadn’t really considered where I was going to sell them. The markets near us aren’t open until the end of May at the earliest and we won’t have honey until July. At this point, we’re not growing enough flowers to solely sell them, so it really wasn’t necessary for me to attempt early spring bouquets, but I'm glad I did and I’ll explain why in the next point...
My companion blooms, which I had carefully chosen to perfectly accompany my tulips in a bouquet, are still trailing far behind with showing their flower faces. They should, in theory, all be blooming together, but, alas theory and reality are worlds apart. The three blooms I wanted to mix were tulips, ranunculus, and chinese forget-me-nots. The ranunculus had a little set back, I believe due to excessive heat in the polytunnel. They are just now putting out buds, but should have done so already. The forget-me-nots aren’t even close to blooming. Next year, I will try a different planting approach to getting simultaneous blooms. I’m thankful for the learning experience now when it doesn’t matter so much that I failed!
Most importantly, I realised that I don’t want to sell tulips. I mean maybe someday, when we have acres and a host of eager patrons, but right now, they aren’t a good fit. I went astray from one of the key aspects of gardening that gives me a thrill: regeneration. I never stop feeling wonder at the way a plant makes hundreds of its own seeds and that I can collect those seeds and make many more plants, or how tubers, rhizomes, corms, and bulbs multiply every year allowing me to grow more and more beautiful flowers without spending more and more money. It’s like a bottomless Christmas Stocking.
Tulips, charming as they are, are notoriously hard to perennialize. Most gardeners treat them as annuals, but unlike most other annuals that you can buy cheaply as plugs or seed, tulips come at a premium. Where one packet of zinnias may cost you $3 and provide you a crop of 50-100 blooms, 50 tulips bulbs will cost you somewhere between $10-$25. A worthwhile investment if you have lots of designated space and an established flower clientele.
We’ll continue to grow a few tulips as an early spring food source in our permanent bee garden; they really are a joy to see after a long winter, but I am grateful for the lessons they taught me. We’re enjoying the pleasures of harvesting and sharing them with our loved ones all while clearing space for the next round of flowers we’ll be sowing: Zinnias, cosmos, and cornflowers! I cannot wait!
~Beth
