Hello, I'm Roz Chandler from Field Gate Flowers. You are listening to the Cut Flower podcast. This is for you if you want to learn more about growing your own cut flowers. We'll cover loads of subjects things like setting a patch, your soil, manure and compost, seeds and germination, perennials and biannuals, foliage and so much more. We'll have some exciting guests along the way. Thank you very much for listening.
Hello, today we're going to talk about tulips and tulips not from Amsterdam. They're actually from your cutting patch. So tulips are amongst the most popular of bulbs. They're bright brilliant colours and all sorts of shapes. You plant them in autumn first show spring flowers and are one of the early things that come out and obviously provide you lots of joy. Tulips grow best in fertile, well drained soil and in full sun. And they don't like strong wind because they flop if they're in wind, so they need to be sheltered from strong winds. They also don't like very wet conditions. So they're a little bit choosy really. And that will affect how they actually grow.
We would suggest incorporating organic matter into the soil, before planting into clay soils in particular and sandy soils, and making them much more suitable for tulips. A neutral to alkaline soil is preferred. They're a bit choosy our tulips, and soils with a pH lower than 6.5 may need applications of lime to grow tulips or if you're growing them in raised beds, you can obviously control the environment a lot better. So last autumn, which is when or actually it was probably in the summer when I ordered the tulip bulbs, I had a tulip mania thing I think. I looked at a couple of catalogues and I ordered many thousands. We now have 37 varieties on our farm today.For you, you need to consider why you're growing them and what you need them for. for personal and business uses are really different. For business, you'll be looking for a longer season. You'll be looking for long stems from a floristry point of view and also the colours that work for your market. So if you're growing for pure pleasure, you can go mad in those catalogues. So tulips are divided into fifteen divisions chiefly defined by their flower characteristics and sometimes referred to in a bulb catalogue. So this might help you.
Broadly speaking, their flowers can be described as single or double, cup shaped, bowl shaped or goblet shaped, fringed, parrot, or lily flowered, long, slender or star shaped. So quite a variety there. And I think we need to look at the catalogues and decide what you love and then look at how early they come into flower or how late they come into flowers. You can cross the whole spring by having a different lot of varieties and also look at the length of the stem. So the early varieties can be quite short-stemmed, which doesn't help you if you're really picking them as a cut flower. So just watch that. It is nice to have earlies but be aware they might be quite short in the stem. So, some of my personal favourites. I was going out there this morning. I was looking around and I thought, what are my top 10 favourites here and this one was pretty difficult. So I'll give it a go.
Poco loco. I mean if you've got a name like that, that's pretty impressive, isn't it? I wish I had a name like Poco Loco. It's a kind of pinky apricot tulip that I mean it massively opens up during the day and then closes at night. Yeah, definitely add Poco Loco to your collection.
Apricot parrot. This one's award winning and lots of people have apricot parrots. Its giant blooms feature apricot petals with a kind of, what's the best way, feathery look. They’ve sort of got wavy fringed edges really unusual the apricot parrot and I recommend you add that to your collection. And perhaps my favourite. Am I allowed to have a favourite? It’s like having a favourite child isn't it? But I will go for this one. Green star. This is really like a designer tulip. It looks like a star, it's scented pure white petals and then you get green as well. It's got strong thin stems. It grows quite tall, about forty centimetres; so great in all arrangements, and it flowers mid to late April. We've actually got it in our tunnel, growing in our polytunnel as well as outside. And then in our polytunnel, it came in late March and outside it's flowering now. So Green Star is definitely one of my favourites.
Next one is Orange Emperor. It’s an early tulip, so that's if you want to get early flowers. It’s a deep orange tinged with green, and it's got a sort of light scent to it. Not huge, but a little scent to it.
This one, I may have to spell it. A-N-T-R-A-C-I-E-T. This one's deep red bowl buds, so it's not very useful in terms of if you're a wedding florist, but it's great in bouquets. Great in arrangements. It's got large double flowers, so sort of a velvety plum colour. I wouldn't say it would think red, I'd say it was more plum pink, but have a look at that one.
Next one, Chato. This is a sort of fun one. It's a bright pink, frilly double tulip. It's like looks a bit like a peony. I would never have said this one was a tulip. So I recommend that one.
Next one, Temple’s Favourite. I love this one because it's really cool. It's a tall, elegant tulip with rosy orange petals. Got a little bit of yellow at the base, but it's very tall and quite interesting. So that's why it made my favourite list.
Black hero. This one made the list because it's unusual. It has a rich maroon black double flowers that open into frilly little bowls. So again, quite unusual. Here at Field Gate Flowers, we try to grow really unusual varieties because we think you can't compete or would want to wear the yellow and red imported ones at the supermarket checkouts. So try and be a little bit different in your selection.
Um, number nine is Apricot Pride. Or this is a powder blush colour sort of a peachy great for weddings great and floristry arrangements, has a sort of romantic elegant feel to it. So Apricot Pride gets on the last.
And the last one is Sweet Impression. This is the salmon and deep pink flower. It's got lovely leaves, like really succulent green leaves with sort of cream edges. So it's really different. It's tall. So it's another tall variety. And honestly, that would probably be very high up on my recommendations. So that's everything about tulips. We will do another podcast on growing and planting and looking after them and all those things. But today was just a quick overview of tulips and our recommended favourites. So I would recommend you get those catalogues now and just yeah, coffee table books. Just have a play. Take care.
Thank you for listening. This has been the Cut Flower Podcast. Please do join us on our Facebook group, The Cut Flower Collective for lots more hints and tips. Thank you.