questions

QUESTION FOR GEORGIA:
Anna Blair
 * How tall is the tallest tulip in Georgia?**

QUESTION FOR TEXAS:
Stephanie
 * How many of your tulips have bloomed in Texas?**

RESPONSE FROM HUSTON, TEXAS:
Good questions. We also planted 100. We have 88 emerged 33 blooming at this point. We are in Houston, Texas. Where are you?

OUR RESPONSE:
Thank you for the speedy response. We are in St. Petersburg, FL. If you have any more questions please e-mail us. We love investigating in our garden.

QUESTIONS FOR ALASKA:
Allison
 * I wonder if any of Alaska's tulips have grown. When do you think they are going to sprout?**

Caya
 * I wonder how long the tulips in Alaska will live because it is so cold.**

RESPONSE FROM BAXTER ELEMENTARY IN ANCHORAGE, ALASKA:
Greetings from Anchorage! I would imagine the main difference in our tulip gardens is the 2-3 feet of snow covering our sleeping bulbs! Our snow came later than usual this year, so I am a bit concerned about the ground freezing too deeply and damaging the bulbs. January brought lots of snow and this month we have a a couple of freeze-thaw cycles that have compacted the snow pack quite a bit.

If your class watches the start of the Iditarod Dog Sled Races this weekend, you will see Anchorage and our snow. There are several websites that you can check for that information. I will let you know they truck in the snow to cover the streets in downtown Anchorage for the start of the event, but as the teams leave town,they are running on trails about a mile away from our school.

If we have a usual spring, "break-up" or the time all the snow disappears from the ground, usually occurs the first couple of weeks in April. Then, depending on temperature and rainfall, the ground will start to thaw. I think 2 years ago the bulbs I planted for this project began to emerge in the first week of May. It was about 10-14 days before they were in bloom. I am at a different school, so it will be interesting to see if the emergence and blooming are the same.

Tulips and other "spring" bulbs do well and will come back year after year as long as they are planted in a warm, sunny location with well-drained soil and no moose can dig them up. Moose are vegetarians that do love a good bulb every now and again to add to their diet!

Thanks for asking. I can only imagine that in sunny Florida you are already watching your bulbs emerge. Do you have to dig and refrigerate your bulbs each year for them to rebloom? Diane Sickles Baxter Elementary Third Grade

OUR RESPONSE:
We do have to dig spring bulbs and refrigerate them so they know when to bloom and when to store up energy for the winter. We ordered fresh bulbs this year, but since we don't have a cold enough winter we put them in a fridge. We kept it at 45 degrees F with nothing but bulbs in it. We were sure to keep any fruit far away from the fridge since ethylene gas will cause the bulbs to die. Ethylene gas is released from fruit telling the plant to drop the ripened fruit off. It is also why if you put a banana in a bag it will ripen. The ethylene helps the fruit ripen. It also signals flowers on the plant to die and start creating fruit. We took ours out the first week of January, according to the Journey North directions and planted them in two garden beds. We only have 66 of 100 bulbs emerged though. Some students think more will emerge. Others think some bulbs looked like they might have mold or rot on them and maybe died in the fridge or weren't good when we got them. Still others have the hypothesis that the fridge was too warm or too cold and a different temperature would help the bulbs. Other gardens that are blooming now have reported 88 of 100 bulbs emerged. We hope more will come up, but it's been plenty warm and wet so we are not sure why they aren't up already.

We are also trying to predict when our tulips will bloom. Other gardens are blooming, but they didn't have to refrigerate their bulbs so we think they got a head start. We have e-mailed to find out how many days it took from emergence to blooming, but we haven't gotten any responses yet (I just e-mailed yesterday). We are starting to think our bulbs might have too much water or that is may have been too hot for them some days. A few of the leaf tips are turning yellow and brown. The temperature here has been swinging from a few days of 78-80 highs and 65 degree lows to 58 degree highs and 32 degree lows. It has also been raining quite a bit for what should be a dry season. Florida is a peninsula so its weather acts kind of like an island. Our seasons are less differentiated than a place like texas where they have much more inland area. We also get quite a bit more rain. The water all around us keeps the temp. from changing much (water has a high heat capacity, it takes a lot of temperature change to change the water temp, so the water stabalizes the temperature a little bit so there is less change than there would be if we were inland).

If you have any more questions we love to explore and experiment with our garden so we are more than happy to think about your questions and send you our thoughts.

Sarah Swoch Science Resource Teacher Director of Extended Day Shorecrest Preparatory School St. Petersburg, FL