Tulips are the flower world’s most addictive drug—plant them once and you’ll never stop. Seeing those pops of color come up at the beginning of spring provides a needed hit of dopamine after a long, gray winter. There’s a reason tulip festivals are popular, and if you want to reproduce that look at home, you don’t need to even plant the bulbs in the ground. Do it like the pros, and grow them in the crates they came in instead.
Professional flower farmers grow bulbs differently than you or I, because they plan to cut the flowers for sale, effectively killing the bulb. They buy new bulbs every year. Those bulbs are shipped in flower crates. The pros plant the bulbs mere inches apart, resulting in tightly packed, swoon-worthy blooms. But there’s a hot tip here we can use at home—sometimes those bulbs are planted right in the crates they came in.
The crate, when planted the right way, provides everything the bulb will need for a season, and you can put it anywhere, including places you don’t have soil for bulbs to go into. You can line a walkway crates, or create seating areas or mazes surrounded by walls of color.
If you’re not going to order enough bulbs to get them in crates, and can’t find empty crates by calling around (your local nursery might have some), there’s no reason you can’t use something like a milk crate for the same purpose, and those are often in abundance. at the grocery store. The only difference is that milk crates tend to be a lot more open, so you’ll want to use something to close up those holes a bit. The crates aren’t going to move around, so newspaper will do the job just fine, as will brown paper grocery store bags.
Layer a few pieces of newspaper in the bottom and along the sides of the crate, and cover with 3-5 inches of potting soil. Place your tulips bulbs into the dirt, the closer together, the better, so long as they are not touching each other. Remember, when planting tulips, the pointy side of the bulb goes up. Next, layer more potting soil on top—at least 6-7 inches of it—and tamp it down a bit with your hands, since potting soil tends to be light and fluffy. You don’t need to water the crates, because they’ll be outside for the winter and will get plenty.
In the spring, the temperature change will cause the tulips to start to bloom in the crates. At that point, you can cut them close to the bulb, which will effectively make them one season bulbs, or allow the flower to die back on its own, allowing the leaves to remain until winter, so the bulb might be able to come back in year two.
If you have a greenhouse, you can use it to force the bulbs to grow in wintertime, since all they need to sprout and bloom is water, sun, and temperatures in the low 60F range.
Most importantly, now is prime tulip bulb planting season, which means it’s the perfect time to order your bulbs.