Article sur comment entretenir les bulbes de tulipes

Je trouve ca intéressant si ca nous permets de conserver les bulbes de tulipes qu'on aime

je vais mettre ici comme lorsque je mets un article sur mon forum de danois. Je donne le lien toujours mais je mets le texte car des liens sur le web, ca disparait avec le temps et on perds l'information. Mais vous pouvez voir quand meme qui a écrit et donc on respecte l'auteur.

***************************************

http://www.canadiangardening.com/how-to/techniques/tulip-booster/a/1446?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=cg_131016

Tulip booster

By Stephen Westcott-Gratton Photography by Mark Burstyn

Easy techniques to keep your tulips blooming

As most gardeners know, tulips bloom best the first year after planting; thereafter, it's often a slow decline until you're eventually left with a sorry-looking patch of green leaves. Some tulips (notably species, Darwin and Triumph types) may continue to bloom season after season, but most cultivated varieties produce fewer and fewer blooms each year. When these bulbs stop producing flowers, they're known as “blind” tulips.

To avoid a disappointing springtime floral display, conventional wisdom recommends lifting and discarding tulip bulbs every two or three years. With hundreds of cultivars now available, it's certainly tempting to treat them as annuals, but these throwaway practices don't help when your favourites suddenly become unavailable. Fortunately, tulips are naturally perennial, and with a modicum of effort and patience, bulbs that have exhausted their capacity to produce flowers can be brought back to floriferous splendour in a couple of years.

Revitalizing regimen

Year One (mid-spring): Once your tulips start producing few (or no) flower buds, feed them with a water-soluble fertilizer high in phosphorus (the middle number), such as 15-30-15, every 10 days until the foliage begins to turn yellow and wither. Never bind or braid the leaves, as this interferes with the bulbs' ability to store food for the following year.


Year One (early to midsummer): When maturing foliage begins to turn brown, it's time to lift and inspect the bulbs. You'll find that the “parent bulb” has shrivelled and been replaced by several smaller bulbs; keep the offspring for replanting (discard the parent bulb along with the garden waste).

Now collect the small bulbs, trim off any remaining stems and dislodge soil with a jet of water. Then leave them to dry in an open, airy space for one week (a window screen laid flat and raised off the ground works well).

Meanwhile, find a small, dry patch of the garden where you can cosset your bulbs in a separate nursery bed without disturbing other plants (allow enough room in the patch to space bulbs 10 centimetres apart). Prepare the bed by digging the soil to a depth of 25 centimetres and adding composted manure until a ratio of one part soil to one part manure is attained. To speed up the flowering process, mix super-phosphate formulated for bulbs into the soil, but avoid using bone meal because it may attract unwanted animals.

Once the bulbs are completely dry and the nursery bed is ready, plant them 15 centimetres deep and water well. After the initial watering, do not irrigate again until early autumn. Being natives of Turkey (where summers are hot and dry), tulips require a long, dry “bake” underground. So, it's no wonder that when we plant them in mixed borders and water them regularly, they decrease in vigour and become susceptible to disease.

To complete the planting, either mulch the bulb bed with a thin (three-centimetre-deep) layer of wood chips (to discourage weeds) or over-plant with drought-tolerant annuals such as cosmos, mari-golds, portulaca and sage (Salvia cvs.), which will suppress weeds by acting as “living mulch.” Once the bulbs have been planted, and the bed mulched, you can forget about them until the next season.

Year two (spring):Generally, about one-third of these bulbs will produce flower buds; cut the buds off when they appear or as soon as they open (you can pop them in a vase and enjoy their blooms indoors). Then, repeat the fertilizing regime followed that first spring by feeding the bulbs with a water-soluble fertilizer high in phosphorus and letting them bake for a second summer.

Year two (autumn): Lift the revitalized bulbs from the nursery bed and replant them in your borders. Or, if bulbs are still undersized, leave them for yet another season until they're large enough to be planted in the garden.