I've always wondered how all these mail order places get their starts. Ones I'm mostly curious about are the Iris and Lilium. Say for instance a person wants to start growing bulk amount of bulbs, where does one even look for a source? When searching online, all the results are for already established companies, not information for the curious or potential new business. So if someone does want to purchase bulbs in bulk, where to look? Europe? Austrailia? South America? Canada? Thanks, and look forward to discussing this. Kara
First off I would check the net for mail order and make some phone calls. Try to get a big-shot on the phone because the price/bulb would be VERY different when talking about 6 bulbs vs 6000 bulbs. Another path might be to start the plants as seeds in a green house. Then grow them for the first year, pull them and use them as your seed for your first market crop the next year. I’m guessing that this is how most of them start. Filling a field with bulbs out of your pocket would be ridiculously expensive. Think it over, Michael
Oh we are thinking about it, but that's the limit of it all at the moment. We have 100 acres not doing much, and thought about using it somehow. So you think that most people just try to increase their current stock versus buying bulbs outright?
First you are going to have to source bulbs which are easy to propagate, there are some lilies that produce bulbils on the stem.....seed is a way of producing large numbers of plants with a small outlay, only problem is they can take many years to reach saleable size.............first do some reasearch on bulbous plant propagation.
Lilies can be propagated through scaling. You can make upto 6 or 7 bulbils out of 1 scale. A lily bulb usually has a minimum of 12 scales. Asiatic lily bulbils can be forced into flowering size in a year. Oriental scales don't produce as many bulbils and are a little slower to flowering size, maybe 2 years. Trumpets and Orienpets vary and are somewhere between the first two types. Bearded Iris seem to multiply pretty fast on their own. From personal observation, a single fan doubles or triples by the 2nd year.
