SKAGIT, Wash. — The annual Skagit Valley Tulip Festival came with plenty of rain this year, but Tulip Farmer Andrew Miller said that’s good news for next year’s bloom.
Miller, a co-owner of Tulip Town in Mount Vernon, is busy working with his team to harvest the tulip fields for next spring.
“Our crops come in April with the color, and that’s what everybody comes for,” Miller said. “But our harvest is in June and July, and that’s getting the bulbs out of the ground and into storage so we can do it all again next year.”
Harvesting 500,000 tulip bulbs is a daunting task, but it’s an annual effort and a part of what makes farming tulips unique.
“A lot of farmers bring in new bulbs from Holland every year,” Miller explained, adding that Tulip Town is one of a few farms in the country that harvests their bulbs and replants them in the fall. “Our founder was Dutch, and he was a bulb farmer, and so we are set up to harvest our own bulbs year after year.”
Olga Santiago is the field manager at Tulip Town and has more than 30 years of experience working the fields. She said the busy season is underway as they have two months to harvest the fields and prepare the bulbs for storage.
“It takes a lot of time,” Santiago said. “Harvesting and sorting, drying and then storing them all before we make it all look perfect again in the spring.”
Tulips in bloom: A look at the 2022 Skagit Valley Tulip Festival
Santiago and her team of workers share duties with a tractor that retrieves rows of bulbs that were planted in netting last fall. Because tulips are a rotational crop, there are stretches of field that need to be harvested by hand. That means digging through mud, sand and clay to find and preserve as many tulip bulbs as possible.
The harvest consumes much of the Tulip Town property. The grounds are also stripped of the colorful garden beds, and the interior boutique shopping facility becomes a dry storage areas for the harvested bulbs.
“Each bulb is precious to us,” Miller said.
In 2019, Miller and four former classmates from Mount Vernon High School formed Spinach Bus Ventures, a Skagit County-based venture capital company, and purchased the 30-acre farm. The owners said they are driven to honor the legacy of Tulip Town as it played an integral role in the founding of the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival in 1984.
“The blooms fade, and the public leaves, but we are out here sweating and worrying and carrying for our bulbs all year,” Miller said. “Whether it’s harvesting them, drying them, or storing them, it’s very much a 12-month labor of love to be a tulip farmer. We look forward to celebrating every stem with you next April.”