Most of us just can’t get enough tulips and daffodils. No matter how many we planted last fall, there always are a few spots in the yard that are not sufficiently stuffed with bulbs.
We could note those spots dutifully, fill them at bulb-planting time next fall and wait until next spring to enjoy them.
Or we can take a shortcut, using presprouted bulbs to fill those gaps or give window boxes and other containers an early start.
Grocery stores and flower shops have been selling sprouted bulbs in pots for years, most often touting them for brightening the indoors. With a little extra care, however, those bulbs also can be used outside in pots or in the ground.
This spring, Garden.com, a leading on-line plant retailer, has taken the idea of planting bulbs in their own blooming season a step further with a line it calls “Bulblings.” Instead of settling for whatever colors happen to show up in your grocery store, you can go to www.garden.com and choose from nine named varieties of tulips (as well as one variety of daffodils and one of hyacinths).
As with many things, though, you pay a late fee. On Garden.com, Bulblings cost $22 a dozen, compared with $7 to $10 for a dozen unplanted bulbs, according to Lisa Sharples, Garden.com’s chief merchandising and marketing officer. Presprouted bulbs cost less at grocery stores and home-improvement stores than on Garden.com — about $10 to $14 a dozen — but that still is more than the price for which most bulbs sell in the fall.
Even so, presprouted bulbs may be worth the premium for gardeners who didn’t get around to planting enough bulbs last fall or who have struck out in the past trying to over-winter bulbs in containers..
In our cold climate, the best use of presprouted bulbs is in containers, says Sally Ferguson, a spokeswoman for the Netherlands Flower Bulb Information Center in New York. “Your climate is so harsh on small containers like window boxes,” she says. “They’re so exposed to freezing. But presprouted bulbs open up the opportunity to tuck tulips and daffodils into pots by the front door or window boxes.”
The second-best use of presprouted bulbs is to make up for hassles brought to you by nature, says Mike Hughes, a horticulturist with Henry Mast Co., a Michigan wholesale grower of presprouted bulbs. Henry Mast grows the bulbs that will appear soon in Chicago-area Home Depot and Frank’s Nursery and Crafts stores. “Mother Nature can get her hands on the bulbs you plant in the fall,”
Hughes says. “Some of them get frozen, or they get eaten by rodents, or the winter is too wet and they rot out.” Plant presprouted bulbs in spring, he notes, “and you eliminate all that worry and get a flush of flowers all at once.”
Garden.com’s Bulblings are packaged in flats of 12 and can be used indoors or out, Sharples says. They will be shipped only after temperatures here are warm enough to eliminate the need to acclimate the bulbs to outdoor weather, she says.
If you buy presprouted bulbs in a store and plan to put them outside, Ferguson recommends buying short sprouts with tight buds. “When they’re still young like that, the flowers are protected from the wind and cold,” Ferguson says.
If all you can find in the store is tall plants that are ready to bloom, put them in an unheated porch or garage, for two days to prep them for the cold. “A fully open flower that’s been raised the whole time in a greenhouse can be burned by the cold,” Ferguson notes, so use them indoors.
The presprouted plants are most likely to rebloom in future years if, after they flower, you replant them where they won’t be overwatered and let the foliage die back completely before you trim it.
Sprouted bulbs are not a way to rush the season; you can’t expect presprouted tulips to survive outdoors if it’s too early for anything but crocuses. But the tulips will generally be fine at tulip time.
It’s one way a gardener can catch up to spring.
