Sustainability and Tulips

No no, we don’t have any tulips right now…. In fact Martyn has reminded me that there’s a box in the shed that I’ve not planted yet! (They’ll be fine, they’ll be in soon)… but we do have a lovely range growing for the spring.

I’ve changed my approach to tulips this year - I’ve previously grown a lot and they’ve been a main spring crop. But this year I’m treating them very much as ‘special feature flowers’ and I’ve opted for lots of different varieties but fewer overall.

Why?

Well tulips are one of our least sustainable crops. We grow them here as annuals yet bulb production is an intensive monocrop process; in fact it takes two years to grow the one bulb that I will use once! Those pretty dutch fields of colour to the horizon are the epitome of industrialized agriculture with all the associated problems; chemical reliance, soil degradation and biodiversity loss. The reason we use them once is because by picking the flower - pulling up the bulb and leaves to get a decent stem length - we strip the bulb of its ability to store enough energy to flower brilliantly again next year. So we compost the bulbs. To think that all that happens for something that costs so little in the supermarket (sometimes less than I can buy them wholesale! )is quite alarming! It’s one of floricultures’!

Our Tulips

Here in Cumbria we’re not in a position to make gift bouquets or flower weddings without tulips in spring - they’re a dependable provider of fantastic colour, shape, pizazz! - but clearly we do need to consider their role in our products, given their rather unsustainable backstory. So in our continual quest to balance planet/people/profit, I’m opting for fewer, more special, super beautiful ones this year!

- Harriet x