Regardless of whether you grow tulips in a greenhouse or in natural conditions on a flower bed, they will look equally beautiful. As a rule, they are propagated at home by bulbs, but there are other ways of breeding. Learn more about how to do this later in the article.

How tulips breed

If you plant a bulb, it grows, forms a flower and dries after flowering. But before this happens, she will lay a new bulb, which will sprout the next year. This young baby botanist is called the primary kidney.

If there is a shift relative to the mother plant and 2-3 babies appear, they will be called secondary buds. They will grow next spring. And the largest can bloom. Those that are smaller will give a new color in a couple of years.

Important! If you are going to grow some of the old bulbs, then use them to decorate home alleys or borders. In prominent places, it is better to plant young strong specimens.

Tulips have 2 methods of reproduction:

• vegetative - dividing the bulbs;
• generative - seed.

In vegetative division, a new plant can grow because plant tissues contain undifferentiated cells from which new plant tissues and organs are created. In this case, it is an onion.

It will be an exact copy of the parent plant.

But the tulip belongs to flowering crops. Therefore, after pollination, the flower can form seeds. This method is used for selection of tulips both at home and on an industrial scale. If a flower of one variety is pollinated with pollen of another, then a new variety can be obtained in which the features of two parent plants will be combined.

How to propagate tulips with bulbs at home

The physiological feature of young bulbs is that they cannot remain inactive. In the fall they dig them out, separate them from the old ones and put them in storage. You can store in a paper bag or net.

The air temperature in the room should be + 20 ° С, humidity 60–70%. At this point, a flower embryo forms in the bulb, which will germinate in the spring. With the onset of October, the air temperature in the room is reduced to + 17 ° C.

For planting, use only healthy specimens and discard any damaged or with signs of mold.

Now you need to distill so that the tulip blooms:

1. For this, the children are placed in the soil. It can be pure river sand, pure peat or a combination of sand with peat. The mixture is allowed to add garden soil and 50 g of ash as a source of potash fertilizers.
2. Young tulips are planted to a depth equal to the two heights of the original bulb so that only its tip is visible above the soil.
3. Pots filled with soil mixture are watered with a potassium permanganate solution for disinfection.
4. Capacities with tulips are taken out to a room with a temperature from 0 ° C to + 10 ° C and left for 4 weeks.
5. After that, reduce the air temperature to 0 ° C and cover the container with a film. At this time, rooting of plants occurs.
6. After a week or two, the plants are returned back to the room with an air temperature of +10 ... + 12 ° C.
7. Lighting and temperature are gradually increasing. Bulbs at first shade so that the sprouts do not stretch.
8. After the sprouts appeared, they need to be regularly watered - daily or every other day. But you need to do this so that the soil is moist, but not wet.
9. At night, the temperature is lowered. The entire development cycle will take about 3 months.
10. Organize fertilizing with potash fertilizers once every 7-10 days. You can make ash or apply store fertilizers. Stop making them when the foliage begins to turn yellow and die.

How many tulips grow from one bulb

From one maternal bulb, you can get up to 5 children. The exact amount depends on the variety. You also need to consider that a nest with children with a long stay in the soil can simply crumble, and you will not collect everything. Therefore, as soon as the leaves begin to fade - dig, sort and store them.

Did you know? Tulips Antoinette, Belicia, Quebec and some others can form several buds on one stem.

Is it possible to reproduce tulips with scales?

Flakes are sometimes called tulip seeds for their resemblance. They ripen by mid-July. But if the flower has not been pollinated, then no seeds will be formed on it. When the seed box becomes fragile and dry, it is opened and removed from it with flat, brown, drop-shaped seeds. Spread them for drying on a sheet of paper. Then, until landing, they are stored in a paper bag. Sown in the fall.

Landing technology:

1. Choose a pot up to 15 cm high. Fill it with a 5 cm cushion of gravel to ensure good drainage.
2. Then add the sandy soil. You can also use the mixture for cacti, almost reaching the edge of the pot.
3. We spread the seeds on the surface at a distance of 2 cm between them.
4. Sprinkle with a layer of fine sand up to 2 cm deep.
5. We take the pot outside and dig it in the garden. We cover with agrofibre or polyethylene to protect against rodents.
6. The relative humidity of the soil must be maintained so that the seeds can germinate in spring.
7. In early summer, these small plants will die and will remain inactive until next spring, like adult tulips.
8. Keep the soil moist, like last season. And by next year, small bulbs can be transplanted into the soil, at the same time increasing the distance between them, since they will already be crowded in the pot.

Did you know? In order to grow into large bulbs, seeds need from 4 to 7 years.

All varieties of tulips will look great in your flower garden. But they multiply by children much easier, especially if you are not engaged in breeding. It is less labor intensive and flowering occurs many years earlier.