First tulips of the season bloom amidst winter on P.E.I.

Cold, snowy, and icy. That’s what it looked like in Mount Albion, Prince Edward Island, on Friday.

But it was a balmy spring day inside Vanco Tulips, where as many as 2.5 million flowers grow. It’s the biggest tulip farm in the Atlantic region.

If someone from the area has a flower, farmer Bas Arendse said there’s a 95 per cent chance it came from the greenhouse.

“It’s kind of a small miracle that we can do this, and bring spring, the feeling of spring,” said Arendse. “A little bit of hope to the people.”

The tulip bulbs start in cold storage, where they’re tricked into thinking it’s winter. There are 20 freezers on site, each holding about 800,000 bulbs.

Rows of tulips are pictured. (Source: Jack Morse/CTV News Atlantic)

When it’s time, they’re pulled out and moved into the greenhouse, which is springtime as far as the bulbs know.

They grow quickly; it takes only three-to-four weeks for them to be ready to bloom. Workers pull them just before that to give them the longest possible shelf life.

“As soon as people then take the flowers into a warm area, they’ll start to open up of course,” said Arendse. “Ideally they end up fairly quickly on someone’s kitchen table.”

It’s easy to feel like spring working in a bright, warm, 18 degree environment, surrounded by flowers.

The tulips head down a conveyer belt where they’re sorted, their bulbs are trimmed, and they’re packaged into bundles of 10. They’re then put back into cold storage until they can be shipped out to retailers.

Rows of tulips are pictured. (Source: Jack Morse/CTV News Atlantic)

They produce 15 million cut tulips in this greenhouse between the beginning of the season and the end, which is around Mother’s Day.

The very first tulip buckets of the season went out to P.E.I. florists on Friday.

“That feels pretty good, pretty good,” said Vicki Sweeney, florist at Flower Buds, one of the first to receive the flowers. “I mean you can get tulips from Ontario or grown from Dutch tulips, but there’s just no comparison, no comparison.”

The rest of the Maritimes will see them early next week, then on to stores across eastern Canada and the United States.

For more Prince Edward Island news visit our dedicated provincial page.