I messed it up. Properly messed it up. Bought my wife tulips for her birthday and filled them up with water half remembering someone telling me flowers liked warm water like many, many other people do after a long day at work. Ran the tap until it felt like it wasn’t cold anymore, filled the vase with water I’d describe as comfortably warm rather than scolding hot and dropped the tulips in feeling like a domestic goddamn. Came downstairs the next morning to what can only be described as a murder scene of flowers. Drooping heads, stems bent over like they were trying to dodge something, the whole works looking less “I made you breakfast in bed!” and more “something’s happened outside and I think we’re all in trouble.”.
Thankfully my wife was absolutely stellar about it, even as I put them out for the bin because clearly I’d fucked it up beyond redemption.
Turns out tulips hate warm water, they’re actually one of the few flowers that prefers it cold and half arsed googling got me all the way to embarrassment city.
Embarrassment and another bunch gone far sooner than they should have been, which is why I went and did some actual research this time. Part stubbornness, part refusal to let a stupid flower that costs about £4 for a bunch beat me at my own game. Here’s everything I’ve tried since then; The good, the bad (thankfully not many tricks fall into this category, people like tulips far too much to traffic wholly useless information) and everything in between that’ll make your home grown tulips last longer than anyone else’s.
Disclaimer; I know the next bit it’s going to sound weird, but trust me when I say this’ll be your new fridge staple.
The Water Trick:
Cold Water, Not the Nice Warm Kind.
Ok, so hear me out. Most flowers like room temperature water. Too hot and you shock the living shit out of their little stem system, nobody’s good with that. Cold and you send them spiralling into a tulipish meltdown trying to acclimatise. Tulips don’t work like most flowers do though. They like it cold. Proper cold. As in fill up the vase straight from the tap cold. They’re bulb flowers, which means there’s a hormone somewhere in their bulb of a stem that thinks it’s still a chilly morning in tulip-laland even once you’ve cut them and stuck them in water. That hormone tells tulips to keep growing long after we’ve shoved a chunk of rubber stopper in their stems which is precisely why they end up floppy and weeping around the edges of your vase after a few days.
Cold water halts the stems from elongating faster than they’re meant to, which is why the whole straight-from-the-tap business works. Trust me, ignore everyone else who tells you warm water is fine and go cold.
Straight from the tap cold, not left in the cup until it reaches ‘nice comfortable’ levels cold. We’ve got a vase we put pretty much exclusively for tulips these days that spends the winter months living in our fridge, which my eldest thinks is hilarious. Apparently the fridge is for storing juice and absolutely nothing else, so cold water from there and I’ve seen more difference in how long they last than any other trick on this list, good or bad.
[cold-water]
The Penny in the Vase
My mother in law is one of a legion of people who told me dropping a penny in the water would make my flowers last longer and boy did she enjoy telling me when they didn’t. The theory is that copper is antibacterial and will prevent the water from going off and the stems rotting from the bottom up, giving you plenty more time to enjoy those you bought so diligently. Problem is, hardly any copper coins are actually made of copper these days. 2p, 5p and the new £1 coins are just copper plated steel, as is most of the US’s currency these days. That little blob of copper on the penny touching your flowers doesn’t actually do anything useful.
I made sure I tested this one properly. 2 identical bunches of tulips cut at the same time, one with a penny shoved in the bottom of the vase and one without. There’s no way for me to tell you which one looked better at the end of day 4, they both went a bit sad at about the same time.
[the-penny-in-the-vase]
Flower Food, the Actual Kind.
Listen, I’m all for making your own flower feed if you’re feeling resourceful. Every bunch of supermarket tulips come with one of those tiny packets that literally ninety five percent of people empty in the bin along with the plastic wrapper before they even get the flowers home (I did for years). It’s not nothing. That sachet has citric acid and some sugar in it along with something else that stops bacteria from getting into the water too quickly, and trust me it works.
I started making my own- Emergency run for tulips left me mid bunch and I was out of packets- by dropping a teaspoon of sugar and a few drops of white vinegar into each litre of water I was using and let me tell you, I fucked that one up bad. Got the ratio wayyyyy off (too much sugar, whoops) and within twenty four hours my water had gone white, gross and a little bit sludgy. Bacteria party and I was invited. Got it right the second time and honestly, it works.
[flower-food]
I found myself emptying ice cubes into the vase pretty much daily throughout winter because despite knowing about the whole cold water thing; our house runs hot. Like, really hot. We have radiators with FUCK OFF dangerous surface temperatures hot. And tulips are seriously unhappy when you leave them in that kind of heat for too long. Couple of ice cubes dropped into the water once it gets too warm and honestly, watching a droopy bunch suddenly perk back up within an hour of dropping those bad boys in has to be something. Heads lifting again, doing that whole ‘I still love you’ thing flowers do. I put them there because Daddy fucked up and didn’t want them to wilt like last time, its honestly made a difference.
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[ice-cubes]
HOW MUCH AND HOW OFTEN YOU ACTUALLY CHANGE IT
Tulips drink. A hell of a lot. Thats why when you get them from the supermarket they’re always filled almost to the top. A nice big couple of inches covering the stems instead of just an inch or so at the bottom because they’ll drink that with the eagerness of someone who thinks they’re never going to get another drink in this lifetime. The downside to that is they will deplete the water pretty quickly and when you’re changing it every couple of days like you should be because their stems are delicate and start to rot in standing water way faster than you’d think, that water needs replacing fully, not topped back up to the same level.
Sawed a vase off behind a lamp one time and forgot about it for about a week, the whole lot went septic.
Swamp murky water that I could swear moved when you weren’t looking and a thick, gross coating at the bottom of the vase where the stems had literally rotted off into nothing at the base.
Bin it was, about a week too soon.
[changing-the-water]
So there we have it. Everything I’ve learned through absolute, bloody wasteful incompetence when it comes to tulips. Nobody likes throwing away flowers that could’ve still looked pretty half a week on but that’s just how it is when you ignore water temperatures and feeding them ridiculous amounts of sugar.
Cold water, changed regularly with a small cut at an angle into the base of the stems. Ice cubes when your house is more volcanically active than it has any right to be in February and actual, Use The Packet, flower feed. None of it took me more than a few moments here and there to do. It’s consistency that mattered, sticking with the small things that actually help rather than one big nice thing that doesn’t.
Told you tulips were fussier than they look.
My wife’s birthday bunch this year lasted two weeks. Two whole weeks. I’ll consider that redemption.
