Half A Million Tulips On Their Farm

Press, Volume C, Issue 29643, 13 October 1961, Page 16

Half A Million Tulips On Their Farm

The thought of acres of blooming tulips brings to mind the dykes and windmills of Holland, but to the people of Southbridge a local tulip farm has a background of a yellow-flowered gorse hedge and the white painted boards of a little old church. On the fertile Southbridge soil half a million tulip bulbs are flowering. Picked in the cool of evening the blooms are stood in water overnight and taken to the market next morning. Many are flown north on the early aircraft to Wellington and Auckland. Five Acres— To Mr W. J. Lewis, his wife and their three children, Brian, Barbara and Lindsay, tulips are a family business. The greater part of their year is spent nurturing and bringing to harvest the five acres of bulbs. The bulbs are planted out in April and are planted by hand deep in the furrows made by a potato moulder which later covers them over with the deep layer of soil

they lie under all winter. Just before the shoots come through the ground is levelled, and as the plants begin to grow there comes the frequent need of hoeing to keep down the weeds. At set intervals during the growing period the plants have to be sprayed to keep out disease. Aphids which carry virus diseases must be killed or an infection could wipe out the crop. Normally the tulips begin to flower about the first week in September and successively the 100 different varieties art cut for the market. Cutting goes on until Labour weekend, by which time all the plants have flowered. Removal of the flowers helps bulb formation and the plant concentrates on this as there will be no seed production. The plants begin to brown and die off by December and lifting the bulbs begins about the week before Christmas. All the bulbs are out of the ground by the New Year. Harvesting the bulbs is a big job. The rows are

ploughed out with the tractor and Mr Lewis employs help to pick the bulbs. This is the time when care must be taken not to mix the bulbs or the following year there will be a mix-up of varieties in the rows. New Ground— Tulips like fresh ground each year and this is also important to prevent small bulbs being left in the ground to grow the next year. All new stock is imported from Holland. Acclimatising the Dutch bulbs to local conditions is a problem and it takes about three years for the bulbs to increase. In the height of the flowering season the work entails long hours and quite a few missed meals if the flowers are to be marketed at perfection. Early Start— Cutting and setting tn water takes all the evening and a start at 3 a m. is necessary the next day to grade and pack the bunches of half a dozen blooms into big boxes and get them to Harewood in time for the first Viscount. As well as the tulips the Lewis family grow 30,000 to 40.000 hyacinth bulbs each year and these flower towards the end of the tulip season and when these are finished there is a crop of iris flowers ready to carry through until mid-November.