This popular 1968 song was sung by Tiny Tim (click here) but that’s the last thing that I want anyone of think about doing in my tulip bed! I’ve worked extra hard this year spraying my tulips with Deer-Off* as soon as any visible green appeared above the frozen ground and then repeated each week. Now that the daffodils have finished with their show for the year, it’s all about tulips!
Our warm daily temperatures in the low seventies have all but destroyed the daffodils but these temperatures seem to perfectly suit the tulips. Last year was sort of a disaster as the deer ate most of my tulips and the temperatures climbed too fast in early March, only to be followed by a hard freeze which killed a lot of the apple tree buds and early flowering bush’s buds.
If it weren’t for the deer, tulips would be an easy flower to grow. I buy mine from Breck’s, which is Holland Company. They send out their catalogue at this time of the year with Fall Advance Super Sale Prices. And so I order my bulbs now and they fill my order in the fall without my paying anything now. Breck’s sends out the bulbs in the late fall when it is the right time to plant them in the Finger Lakes. They bill you only after you receive the bulbs! I like doing business that way. The only thing that I don’t like is to get busy and plant the bulbs in the cold dirt before the ground freezes!
I grumble a lot when my hands are cold and my back hurts from kneeling down and planting the bulbs, but come spring, these colorful flowers quickly erase all of my discomforts from planting the bulbs in the previous fall.
