Winchester Growers - What's happening now

Winter

Lincolnshire

The tulip growing season is now well underway in Spalding. The vast majority of our tulips are grown on hydroponic growing beds. Each individual tulip bulb is placed by hand on a growing spike, the tray is filled with water containing growing nutrients and placed in a dark cold store to grow roots. After a couple of weeks the tulips are then brought out into the light for the shoot to develop. The length of time it takes from spiking the bulb to the harvesting of the flower depends on the time of year, in early January it takes around six weeks.

Our hyacinths bulbs that were planted in the autumn are now being brought out of the rooting rooms and placed in the glasshouses to grow on into wonderfully scented cut flowers. When they reach the perfect maturity stage they are carefully handpicked and either combined with some of our tulips and narcissi to make a cheerful seasonal bouquet or sent out as a straight line.

Spring flowering potted bulbs are also an important part of our business in Lincolnshire, we are now in the process of planting and growing over ¾ million pots of hyacinths for our customers.

Meanwhile our growing teams are busy selecting varieties and buying seeds and bulbs and planning for the summer crops.

Cornwall

The team in Cornwall are currently cropping flowers. We have been working on early varieties for a number of years now. Some of these varieties begin to break through the soil by the end of November and flower the first week of January. These are then closely followed by varieties Barrenwyn, Tamara and Jedna which normally appear in the second week of January

Portugal

Our Portuguese operation is busy growing sunflowers, gladioli and lilies. We take advantage of the warmer climate and high light levels in Portugal to extend the growing season of our main crops, allowing us to crop flowers from April until the main growing season in the UK in the summer time. When the growing conditions for the UK become unfavourable for flowers in around October, production then moves back to Portugal where we can grow and crop flowers until early December. All of the crops that we harvest in Portugal are transported by truck to the UK. Growing in Portugal has reduced our impact on the environment as a business and therefore lowered our carbon footprint during the winter, as we are now less reliant on imports from Africa.