While the calendar says it’s officially spring, Vermonters know it will be weeks before things really start greening up, but there are subtle signs the Green Mountain State is reawakening. Sap is running, snow is melting and tulips are blooming.
This season, Sarah and Thomas Demars, co-owners of Four Blooms Farm in Bristol, have grown thousands of tulips using a combination of growing both indoors and outdoors. The couple started the farm in 2022 when Sarah was newly pregnant with their fourth child. The four blooms are in reference to their four children.
"So that first year we grew a lot of flowers, and we learned a lot, but most importantly, we learned that we wanted to do this full time, so we thought, 'How can we make this sustainable for us?'" Sarah said on a recent sunny afternoon. "And that's when I said to Thomas that I'm going to order tulip bulbs, and we're going to force them in the winter, and we'll figure it out."
Forcing is the process by which a plant is manipulated into flowering under artificial conditions, often earlier than the plant would if grown outside. This year, the Demars packed 500 large, plastic crates full of tulip bulbs and have been slowly exposing them to spring conditions — sunlight and warmth — inside their two indoor growing spaces. As a result, they've had tulips to sell to local markets, florists and through their CSA program for months. As March slides into April, the tulips that were planted outside in a greenhouse are about to bloom as well.
Vermont Public’s Brittany Patterson spent an afternoon with Sarah to see what it takes to grow these colorful, spring-blooming perennials.
This interview was produced for the ear. We highly recommend listening to the audio. We’ve also provided a transcript, which has been edited for length and clarity.
Brittany Patterson: Why are tulips the spring flower?
Sarah Demars: I would say tulips are the spring flower because they're one of the first flowers that come emerging from the ground as the temperatures start to get warmer. Typically, the daffodils will start to rise, and then the tulips start to rise, and the peonies and the hyacinths and so many incredible flowers start emerging in the spring.
Brittany Patterson: Perfect spring day!
Sarah Demars: Yeah, it really is.
When spring comes, it just feels like a new year almost, like a new chapter, a new beginning. All the things that you reflected on the past year are finally going to come to life. And so with that, there's a lot of energy, there's a lot of motivation, there's so much excitement, and then there's also a lot of work.
So this is one of our greenhouses. Currently, we have about 14,000 tulip bulbs in here.
So just within this last week, I've ordered about 80% of our bulbs that we will receive in the fall. So those come between like October and November. So when they arrive to our farm, we either dump the crates in a greenhouse, we'll dig a trench, plant them, water them, cover them, and we'll leave them. I have not had to touch these at all this winter, really, just a little bit of watering.
And then the ones that we force in crates, we think of a crate as like a movable raised bed. So we fill that with some soil. We plant our tulips in there, we water it, cover it, and then we give them like a winter period. And when they're ready for spring, we move them out into the grow space, and we give them warmer temperatures and sunlight, which in our case is grow lights. From there, it takes about three weeks on average to come into bloom. We'll harvest them, process them — which could be like stripping the leaves, cutting the bulbs off — and then we'll bundle them up, wrap them, and we'll send them out to our markets.
Brittany Patterson: Do we have any in bloom?
Sarah Demars: Yeah. So those are indoors. We did have to harvest a bunch, but I kind of shuffled some crates around so that we could see a table in full bloom, which is fun. So what I really love about growing tulips indoors in the winter is like, it could be five degrees outside, and then I come up here and it's like 65 and sunny, but it's really, I mean, it's our lights. So I feel like I've been living in spring all winter.
(door opens)
Excuse the mess.
So right now, with it being like the middle of March, our season indoors is coming down, and we're actually, we only have a few more crates to pull in, and then our ground plantings will start to bloom.
So currently in here we just started a lily crop. We have tulips here. We're testing out hyacinth, allium and daffodils, and then the rest will be all tulips. So we kind of grow in two spots. This one, this big room they are growing a little bit cooler, so they grow a little bit slower. And then in here — this is like our main grow space. So this grow space is warmer, and there's six tables. So we usually have, I think, around 10,000 growing at a time in various stages, from like, just getting pulled in to ready to harvest.
Brittany Patterson: Ten thousand, that’s a lot!
Sarah Demars: Yeah. So for Valentine's Day, we had, literally, every inch of space was covered with tulips. We were growing about 15,000 at the time for Valentine's Day.
This is kind of like, our crate tower. We had over 500 crates that we planted with tulips. So this was our cooler, and that was chock full.
I will say one cool thing about flower farming I'm finding is I could be in the current season, but I'm already so excited for the following season. Like, I'm already so excited for our next tulip forcing program. I'm already so excited for next spring … and it just makes you, like, feel so joyful all the time.
Brittany Patterson: So you basically get a little bit of that spring feeling all of the time.
Sarah Demars: Oh yeah, oh yeah. It’s great.
