Vanco Farms tulips

The April 2015 meeting of the Garden Club of PEI was a field trip to Vanco Farms, in Mount Albion,  PEI.
A large crowd of garden club members were given a tour of the facility.

Vanco Farms grows 40 acres of tulips.  About 20 employees work in tulip production.  It is a busy place. They ship about 200,000 tulips per week, or 4 to 5 million cut tulips per year.  Their drivers transport them twice a week to locations in the Maritimes, Montreal, Boston, and New York, and they are sold locally at the Superstore and at florist shops.  On PEI, the bulbs are available at a retail outlet on-site, and at Home Hardware.  They sell many more in bulk to the cities of Charlottetown and Stratford, and even to Buchart Gardens in Victoria BC.

We all assume that tulip bulbs are shipped from Holland.  Buying Vanco bulbs is a rare opportunity to buy local.

Vanco Farms also grows and processes organic and specialty potatoes in PEI, Georgia, and California.  The potatoes are processed on site.  The potatoes are sold under the Presidents Choice and the Little Potatoes brand.

Vanco was started by Peter VanNieuwenhuyzen, who moved to PEI from Holland.  His sons Rit, Willem and Phillip continue to run the business.  They started a potato operation in Oyster Bed Bridge, and later built the tulip operation in Mount Albion.

The forced tulips that are for the cut-flower market are planted in crates and stored in a huge dark warehouse at 2 degrees C.

Starting in December, the crates are moved to a bright greenhouse, where they spend 4 to 6 weeks.  The greenhouse is kept at about 16 degrees C and is heated by boilers fueled by hay and straw grown on their own fields.  This is a very sustainable way of producing heat.

When the growing tulips are ready to harvest, they keep the bulb attached as long as possible.  Only immediately before packaging are they cut off.  This keeps them as fresh as possible.  Within 3 or 4 days of picking, the tulips are in the hands of consumers.  

In the bunching room, the tulips with the bulbs attached are moved on a long conveyor belt.  Workers pass the tulips through a machine that cuts the stems.  They are packaged in bunches of 10.  One worker packs them in cellophane and checks them for quality and makes sure there are exactly 10 in every bunch.

Bulbs cut from their stems will be replanted.
They will be used to produce seed to create new tulips.

The bunches are moved into cold storage, where they are packed horizontally into boxes.  Then they are moved to refrigerated trucks, where they are transported to buyers.

The Garden Club appreciates the opportunity to see behind the scenes in this fascinating business!

For more information, visit www.vancofarms.com