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Tulip Care to Extend Your Enjoyment

 Tulips!  They make me so happy!  Daffodils and tulips are some of the first flowers to bloom in the spring and bring much needed color to the landscape after facing the winter blues.  Tulips are joyous and come in so many colors.  They are hardy in the spring when the weather toggles between beautiful 70 degree days and winter comes back to slap us in the face.  Seriously...tulips are delightful and one of the reasons I decided to commercial farm them in Central Oregon.

When you purchase local flowers, you get flowers that last longer in the vase because they didn't have to travel far to the store and then to your home.  You can extend their life even longer by following these tips.

First, you will see many tricks for extending the vase life of tulips like putting a penny in the bottom of the vase or pricking a small hole at the top of the stem below the flower head.  Many swear by these methods but truly the tips that work the best are as follows:

1.  Always trim the bottom of your tulip stems when you bring them home right before putting them in the vase.  Cut them straight vs on an angle.  Tulips prefer this vs other flowers.  Trim them every day or every other day at minimum to extend their life.

2.  Change out the vase water every day or every other day.  Also, always use cold water.  Tulips are a cold climate flower and they like cold water.  They suck up lots of water in the vase so make sure the vase doesn't go dry.  Clean, fresh water keeps the bacteria away and extends the life of tulips.

3.  Tulips are supposed to bend and they even grow in the vase!  Timelapse videos even show how much tulips change and move.  If you don't want your tulips to bend so much, after trimming them, wrap them in tall craft paper (still in the vase) to give them structure overnight.  This can correct their direction and make them stand taller and straighter.  Also, use a taller vase to give the stems support.  I personally like when some of the tulips in the arrangement bend and take on different directions.  

4.  Lastly, keep the vase out of direct sunlight.  The more direct sunlight, the more open the tulip flowers becomes and the faster they will die.  

Remember, cut flowers are for the present tense.  Enjoy them!  They don't last forever and they aren't meant to last more than 1-2 weeks.  If you follow the steps above, you will extend the vase life but when they are done...go buy yourself a fresh bouquet!  You deserve it!



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Location: Oregon, USA

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