Just about everyone loves tulips! They are often the first color to appear in the garden alongside daffodils, hyacinths, and other bulb flowers, and planting tulip bulbs requires little effort. And to a Northern gardener, little makes the heart sing more than that first tip of the tulip bulbs poking through the cold soil after months of bleak winter days!
Tulips in pots.
I desperately want to grow tulips in pots, like many European gardeners do. Visions of weathered clay pots filled with glorious tulips lining the front step to our house fill my head each spring. I pour over bulb catalogs, as orders need to be placed in the spring for fall planting. However, clay pots can not be left outside over winter in my Michigan garden. The constant freezing and thawing leave them in a pile of clay shards by spring. So, not one to give up easily, I have tried a couple of different ways to grow tulip bulbs in pots.
A couple of years ago, I planted tulip bulbs in my terracotta pots, and kept the pots inside our unheated garage, right next to the garage bay doors. This was the coldest spot in our garage. During severe winters, it has been cold enough there to freeze. I kept a close eye on the soil, ready to drag the pots towards towards the warmer side of the garage if needed. I was very happy with this arrangement, thinking I had really come up with a game changing idea…until mid February. It turns out, it was too warm in the garage, and my tulip bulbs were sprouting! When planted outside in the garden soil, tulips usually bloom around the middle of May here, so mid February was much too early. There wasn’t anything to be done to slow their growth, and I ended up with very few tulips in pots.
Tulips in plastic pots
Not giving up, I hatched a new plan the following year. I have a collection of tall, heavy duty black plastic pots that I saved from a landscaping project. While plastic is decidedly not the aesthetic I am looking for, form needed to follow function at this point. The idea was, that I could insert the heavy duty plastic pots inside my larger terracotta pots. I could then arrange the pots along the front steps once the tulip bulbs were about to bloom. So, I ordered dozens of tulip bulbs, and, in late October, planted away in the black plastic pots. I had enough bulbs that I also planted tulip bulbs in the fenced garden. The garden bulbs, shown below, were the most successful!
Where we live, winter storms barrel in from the West/Northwest, so, once planted, I snugged the pots outside, up against the side of our detached garage on the northeast side. This location is out of the wind and away from the sun. My new concern was damage from deer. I do not know if this works or not, but I put a couple of extra hot peppers I had grown, on top of the soil on each pot. The hope was to deter any foraging wildlife over the winter months. To my happy surprise, I did not have any deer damage in the pots, where I have had in the unfenced raised beds. The raised beds are only 20 feet away from the spot I chose to overwinter the pots. I checked often, and never saw deer prints in the snow by the pots. So, I can not say for sure that the hot peppers sitting on top of the soil deterred the deer or not!
The tulip show in pots this spring was spotty. Some pots were filled with leaves but no blooms, and others had only a handful of tulip bulbs that sprouted and bloomed. Again, another, what I thought, brilliant, idea that did not turn out as expected. So, what did I do this fall?
Tulips in the new potager
My new potager with fence was completed this summer, so I have set aside, (NOT given up on, just yet!), the vision of weathered clay pots brimming with tulips. I planted my tulip bulbs in the raised beds in the potager, along the inside edges of the center raised beds. Hopefully, this will create a beautiful walkway to the entrance of the glasshouse next May.
As you may deduce from my photos above, my favorite varieties are the Parrot Tulips, which I ordered from Longfield Gardens. I had multiple bags of each color on hand, so I planted blocks of colors in the beds closest to the potager entrance, that mirrored each other on both sides of the walkway. In the raised beds closest to the glasshouse I reversed the order of tulips; all four corners of the small raised beds have the same color tulip bulbs.
Planting tulip bulbs for spring flowers
Four months from now, the first blooms should be budding in the potager. Four months is forever for a gardener waiting to enjoy the fruits of their labor. However, this is the order of life here in a northern garden. While, in December, we are still waiting for the snows and bitter cold of winter to arrive here in Michigan, they will come. And, they will go. The benefit of being a gardener, is the anticipation of what is to come in the gardens in spring! I’d love to hear from you, what flowers do you look forward to in the spring?
