Spring has arrived, which means your always-reliable tulips will soon be blooming, if they haven't already. So are you prepared to help them fulfill all their potential when that dazzling color comes? Spring is always much brighter when your tulips begin to emerge; and every good gardener wants their flowers to stay in top condition, even after the blooming period ends. So below I have listed a few tips to help keep your tulips magnificent-looking for as long as possible.

While your tulips are blooming, you can add a sprinkling of liquid plant food to help give them a good growth spurt, and then sit back and watch the stunning colors become even more intense. Also a little fertilizer – the granular and nitrogen-rich kind – worked into the top layer of soil can also do wonders. Simply scratch the fertilizer into the surface. And remember to keep your soil moist only, never flooded.

Floral preservative is an excellent product to have if you are thinking of cutting a few tulips and placing them in vases around your house. While almost every floral shop carries some type of floral preservative, the best kind is a powdered form with a good combination of plant food and bacteria killers. It is best not to use folk remedies such as bleach water, soda, sugar, or coins in the vase water. Floral preservative is much safer and more dependable and will keep your tulips fresher for a longer period of time.

Over-crowding is bad. You do not want your tulips to get too crowded since it will prevent the blooms from becoming large and full. If you think your bulbs are getting too cramped up, simply wait until the foliage has completely died away, then dig up the bulbs and divide them by pulling or cutting off the smaller bulbs from the main bulb base. Be careful not to damage or bruise the bulbs since that will allow diseases such as Boyrytis (which is so deadly you will have to burn your tulips to get rid of it) to set in; and if you notice that any of your bulbs are scarred, dried out, or have soft spots, it is best to simply throw them away – the bulb is where the plant's food is stored and bigger healthier blooms are what you want. Once you have divided up your bulbs, simply replant them about a half a foot apart. (If you have a lot of replanting to do, you may want to look into various tools at your local gardening center that can make the process easier. They have tools available that can dig out perfectly cylindrical shapes of soil, which can make bulb insertion a lot easier.)

Snails and slugs. They seem pretty harmless, right? Not when it comes to tulips! They are so bad they will eat up your flowers so that all you have left is foliage, and we definitely don't want that to happen, since the flowers are the best part. So what can you do to fight off slugs and snails? Well, you don't want to use messy chemicals like liquid slug killer or other toxic products. All you need to do is get some beer at the store and make a beer trap. Fill up a shallow pan half way with beer, then dig a little hole and put the pan down near the tulips. Slugs and snails like the smell of malt and yeast contained in the beer and they will crawl into the trap and die.

If you notice any standing water near your tulips you should add either compost, sand, peat moss, or some combination of these three to your soil so the water will drain off more easily. Tulips don't grow well in flooded soil – they are susceptible to diseases and fungus in heavy water – so make sure you convert your soil into the well-draining type.

The bulbs of tulips are where all the plant food is stored for the next season. You want to make sure your bulbs are well-stocked with nutrients so you can get plenty of beautiful flowers in the future. The best way to do that is to wait until the flowering stage has passed and then add more fertilizer to the soil, making sure it is rich in nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus, and other beneficial nutrients. (If you have to dig up and chill your bulbs in the refrigerator, remember to store them far away from apples and other types of fruit because they will make the bulbs rot.)

Do you live in a place where your bulbs stay in the ground all year round? Then you need some bone meal for your tulips. It is the ideal fertilizer since it has a lot of phosphorous, which is good for developing strong roots. Bone meal is also a slow-acting fertilizer that lasts quite awhile. Adding about one teaspoon to every tulip hole will be all you need.

‘Deadheading' is also important when your tulip petals start to fall. To deadhead your plants, just leave the stems and leaves in place and remove the entire flower head. This allows the nutrients to not be wasted by going up into the dying flower parts, but instead traveling down into the bulb to be stored for the future.

So there you have plenty of tips to keep your tulips in wonderful shape throughout the spring and well into the summer.

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