ORANGE CITY, Iowa | The classic pop song “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” has had many iterations since it was written in 1929 by Al Dubin and Joe Burke. In 1930, it was featured in the first-ever Looney Tunes cartoon. In 1968, weird pop crooner Tiny Tim claimed it. In 2011, it was used to chilling effect in the horror film “Insidious.”
And a tulip festival without tulips? That’s truly insidious. Insidious and problematic and not always avoidable as the folks at the Orange City Tulip Festival learned the past couple of years. Stem Fest? That’s what some called the 2012 event when a warm spring caused tulips to bloom a couple of weeks before the fest, with but one late variety remaining for the big week. Then last year, a cold spring kept the flowers from starting to bloom until festival Saturday.
This year, the good Lord willing (and the creek don’t rise), the tulips will bloom on schedule at Iowa’s foremost tulip fest, like they have done for most previous Tulip Festivals.
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Thirty thousand new tulip bulbs are planted in Orange City each year, and those are just the new ones, said Mitch Albers, director of Orange City’s parks and recreation department.
And the Tulip Town Bulb Company, which provides bulbs for the city each year in addition to those planted at the company’s downtown display garden, is equally hopeful for flowery festival, said co-owner Brett Mulder. The bulbs come directly from the Netherlands, he noted, and second-year bulbs are made available to the public by the parks and rec folks.
“What we try to do is have a number of varieties,” Mulder said. “We have over 50 varieties of tulips that we hope to have in bloom at Tulip Festival. That’s what our challenge is.”
And while the weather was problematic the past two years, the previous five years saw the tulips arrive on time, for the most part. Mulder and his wife Nora took over the business in 2006 from Vander Wel Tulip Test Gardens, changed the location and renamed it. The Vander Wels had operated the tests gardens for about 26 years, he noted. And it remains a part-time enterprise. Mulder works full time at Van Beek Natural Science.
Mulder said they mostly plant the later varieties of tulip in October, just before the ground freezes, hoping they will bloom come festival time, always the third weekend in May. The planting comes just before the ground freezes and the ground temp is about 55 degrees. It works best right after the first frost, he noted.
“We get the bulbs from Holland. So that’s what’s unique about us in Orange City,” he said. “They’re the Dutch bulbs that we get basically in September. So we fill orders for them in September to customers who have come to the previous Tulip Festival and saw what they liked.”
The tulip bulbs are typically pretty hardy. It’s just a matter of timing, he said.
“We prepare the soil. We use a lot of peat moss, try to get a real light soil so that they can take root, then water them well, especially with these last few years of drought,” Mulder said. “And first-year bulbs, they really don’t need fertilizer. We throw on a little bit of calcium product that we make at Van Beek Natural Science. But really, they’re self-sufficient for that first year. Then with second-year bulbs, we’ll put a little bit of a bulb booster that you can buy at any greenhouse.”
While tulips will naturally return from year to year, the thing about them, he noted, is that the taller, later varieties most folks favor, the 24- to 30-inch tulips, don’t multiply as well. When you start getting the little baby bulbs, you start getting more leaves than blooms, and the leaves take some away from that primary bulb, he said.
After two to three years, you’ll want to dig ’em up, tear off those baby bulbs and replant, to guarantee more long-stemmed beauties, he said.
“In Orange City, we plant new bulbs every year, and we provide the city with the bulbs, too,” he said. “Then basically we put the plants together, what to plant, where and kind of the quantities and stuff. We help Mitch with determining all that,” he said. “We get that approved the year before as we order the bulbs for the coming year.”
The primary tulip areas are Windmill Park downtown, along with other parks around town. They also plant about 6,000 tulips on Main Street. And those are always red and yellow.
“We try to go red-road and yellow-yard,” Albers said. “That’s kind of been a staple of the Tulip Festival. So we stick with that. We have 13 different types of tulips in Windmill Park alone. In the parks, we like to change it up and get some different looks from year to year and have some fun with it.”
Helping to plant those tulips in October each year are the middle school students from MOC-Floyd Valley, he noted.
Albers, who has been the parks and rec director for six years, said the city plants roughly 30,000 tulips in the parks. That doesn’t include the thousands of tulips blooming on personal property around town along with the larger gardens at Northwestern College, the Sioux County Courthouse, Orange City Health Systems, Diamond Vogel Paints and, well, just about everywhere in Orange City.
The Mulders planted a little under 3,000 bulbs this year in the Tulip Town Bulb Company display garden, the same number planted at the courthouse.
“We offer about four or five new varieties every year to try,” he said. “It just depends on what’s in bloom. A lot of mixes are popular. We’ve introduced Darwin Hybrid Single Lates. They come in all different colors. Giant oranges are real popular, huge blooms, each with 18 inches of growth."
Each year, the Tulip Festival queen picks a favorite to plant. “We do a Queen’s Choice, and last year the queen was my niece, McKenzie Mulder, and she chose a Double Late variety, kind of more like a peony tulip,” he said.
”We always like to say there’s a lot more to the Tulip Festival than just the tulips, but people do like the tulips,” he said. “For most other people, there’s lots of other things to do in Orange City besides the tulips. But that’s our goal: to have real tulips blooming in Orange City the third weekend in May.”
