12/04 a scene from a Dutch painting, four-year-old Nevaeh Roweth-Garrett takes time to enjoy the tulips for the last time before the flowers
12/04 a scene from a Dutch painting, four-year-old Nevaeh Roweth-Garrett takes time to enjoy the tulips for the last time before the flowers are decapitated and left in the field to rot near their Norfolk home. ..COPY:..If you think it's a tough job dead-heading flowers in your garden, then spare a thought for the small team of people tasked with picking the heads off every flower in this vast field of none of the blooms from this, Britain's largest field of tulips will make their way to florists or find their way to a vase on your kitchen table. Instead, every head will be removed leaving only stems and bulbs left in the soil. .The vast majority of the heads will be left, colours fading, in the field to rot, save a few which will be hand selected to decorate floats at the annual Spalding Flower Parade. .Next week ten pickers will begin the painstaking job of nipping off the best 'show' flowers from the 120 acre field in Narborough, Norfolk. A machine will finish the job, guillotining the remaining heads from their the flower heads before the plants go to seed keeps more energy in the plant and helps the bulbs to planting, it takes between one and five years for the tulip bulbs to flower and become large enough to sell. .Next month these Norfolk bulbs will be pulled and taken to Belmont Nurseries near King's Lynne where they will be processed. Bulbs large enough to flower will be stored and sold to British supermarkets next year. Smaller bulbs are sorted into sizes and replanted, for sale in the Nurseries are the only large-scale tulip growers left in Britain - producing about 15 million bulbs each year. A spokesman said: "We have to select the fields with soil that's most similar to the Dutch tulip fields. Our own ones [fields] have too much clay and don't drain well enough so we rent fields with a higher sand content from other farms nearby - this year's field is over half an hour's drive from ou
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Photo credit: © Rod Kirkpatrick / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
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Keywords: blooming, british, field, flowers, fstoppress, norfolk, picture, pictureitnow, pin., press, spring, stop, tulip, tulips
