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The Tulip Industry is Changing

What’s Happening & Why It Matter


If you’ve bought tulips from me between December and March, they were winter-forced. That’s because tulips are the primary flower for everything we do at The Fertile Burb in those months—weddings, bouquets, flower shares, and market arrangements. If you’re getting flowers from me in the dead of winter, they’re tulips.


And while I love growing them, I won’t lie—this year, I’ve had to stop and ask myself whether winter tulips are going to be sustainable for much longer. Because behind every bunch of tulips I pull from the cooler is a complicated, rapidly shifting tulip industry.


Let’s talk about what’s going on.



 


The Tulip Industry is Changing—Fast

The tulip industry is changing in ways that growers, florists, and even casual gardeners are starting to feel. Two years ago, ordering tulip bulbs was fairly predictable. You planned ahead, placed your orders, and received strong, healthy bulbs in time for planting. Now? Between climate challenges in Holland, surging demand, and supply chain disruptions, the entire tulip supply system has become more unpredictable than ever.


It’s not just that prices are increasing (though they are—dramatically). It’s that certain varieties are becoming harder to access, lower in quality, and nearly impossible to secure in the quantities small farmers need. Whether you grow tulips in the ground for spring or force them in winter, these shifts are making tulip farming more challenging than ever.




The Last Two Years Have Been Rough in Holland

If you’ve ever ordered tulip bulbs for your garden, you’ve probably seen “grown in the Netherlands” stamped all over the packaging. That’s because the Netherlands is tulip country. They’ve been breeding and growing tulips for centuries, and they’re the reason we have the sheer variety of tulips we do today.


But the last two growing seasons have been brutal.


This farms tulip field completely flooded.
Left: Healthy Tulip Field, Right: Tulip Field Under Water

First, they had severe drought. Tulip bulbs need just the right amount of moisture at the right time to develop properly. Not enough water? The bulbs stay small, weak, and don’t produce strong flowers.


Then, just as farmers were trying to recover from that, they got hit with massive flooding. And if drought stunts tulips, flooding straight-up wipes them out. Waterlogged fields lead to disease, rot, and entire crops getting scrapped.




Less water one year, too much water the next. The result? A tulip shortage—and a bad one.




The Tulip Frenzy Nobody Saw Coming

Here’s where it gets messy. Normally, even when tulip production dips, things even out. But this time? Demand for tulips didn’t just stay high—it exploded. Tulip mania? Yup!


In the last few years, more people—especially in the U.S.—have gotten into specialty tulips. The frilly doubles, the elegant parrots, the fringed beauties. Tulips used to be seen as just grocery store flowers, but now? They’re everywhere.


A favorite variety of tulip we haven’t been able to source for two years.
This beauty has been unavailable to me for the last two growing seasons.

Blame Instagram. Blame wedding trends. Blame the fact that once you’ve seen a good specialty tulip, you can’t unsee it. Whatever the reason, people want them. Florists want them, designers want them, home gardeners want them, and small flower farms like mine want them.


The problem? There aren’t enough to go around.




The Supply Chain Scramble

In a normal year, tulip growers plant, harvest, and distribute their bulbs like clockwork. But after two back-to-back bad seasons, they’re scrambling.


Some tulip farms simply don’t have enough bulbs to sell. Others are selling bulbs that normally wouldn’t have made the cut just to meet demand. And then there’s the issue of varieties that have become too popular for their own good.


Take one of my favorite pink double tulips (I won’t name names). It used to be easy to get. But there’s only one farm in the Netherlands that grows it, and as its popularity has skyrocketed, it’s now nearly impossible to source. And the kicker? The quality has dropped. Because when there’s more demand than supply, growers have to push out bulbs they’d normally reject just to fill orders.


It’s not just this one variety. It’s happening across the board.




How This is Changing the Tulip Industry

The tulip world is shifting fast, and small growers like me are feeling it.


Fusarium of some of the 2025 tulip bulbs received.
A small example of bulbs I received with fusarium this year. These bulbs are unusable.

• Bulb quality is slipping. Farmers who used to only sell the best of the best are now having to ship out whatever they’ve got. And that means more variability—bulbs that might not root as well, tulips that don’t perform like they used to.


• Some tulips are turning into exclusive, hard-to-get varieties. A handful of large buyers are scooping up entire crops before small growers even get a chance to order. Some farms are now requiring pre-orders more than a year in advance, and even then, there are no guarantees.


• Prices are climbing. We’ll talk about this more in the final post, but the cost of tulip bulbs is skyrocketing. Cheap, widely available bulbs? Those days are disappearing.


• Growers (including me) are having to rethink everything. The old system of planning a tulip season—picking varieties, ordering bulbs, scheduling crops—doesn’t work the same way anymore. Now, it’s about securing what you can, as early as you can, and being prepared for some disappointments along the way.



What used to be a predictable, steady supply chain is now an industry that feels… a little chaotic.




What’s Next?

With all the changes happening in the tulip industry, it’s easy to focus on the shortages and rising demand. But for those of us growing tulips out of season, the challenges don’t stop once we secure the bulbs. Winter forcing is an entirely different game, and it comes with its own set of costs, logistics, and hurdles that make it far more complicated than just putting tulips in the ground and waiting for spring.



 


In the next post, we’ll break down why winter forcing is so expensive, what it actually takes to grow tulips out of season, and why these costs are only increasing.



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ABOUT THE BURBS

The Fertile Burb is a flower farm & design studio in Gainesville, VA, serving the entire DMV area. We spend half our days elbow-deep in the soil of our 1/4 acre regenerative suburban farm and the other half marveling at the charm and wonder of locally grown flowers, always designing with you at the heart of it all.

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