How do I break tulips?

October 17, 2019 11:19 AM

I have some broken tulip bulbs from last year. I would like to give some new tulip bulbs the breaking virus. Is there a correct way to transmit the virus-- inject the new bulb with broken tulip smoothie? The scholarly stuff I saw talked about aphids transmitting the virus, but I'd like to do it without insect help.
posted by gregr to Home & Garden (5 answers total)

I've heard of "bulb grafting" as the traditional method for producing new broken varieties.

I assume you cut a wedge out of a healthy bulb and insert a slice of infected tissue, but you'll probably have to dig back into 100+-year-old horticultural manuals for instructions--my understanding is that most modern "broken" tulips are produced by breeding, not viral infection, and it's illegal to sell TBV infected bulbs in most places. So nobody in the tulip trade actually does this anymore.

(As an aside, I'm not a tulip expert, but are you certain that you have truly TBV-infected bulbs?)
posted by pullayup at 11:36 AM on October 17, 2019 [2 favorites]

So I'll assume that 1) you do have a real broken tulip and 2) you are clearly informed of the ethics of A) willingly spreading a disease that literally destroyed people's lives in the past, and B) could easily destroy your neighbor's tulip beds in just a few short years. C) Creation of such material may be illegal in your jurisdiction, let alone distribution or sale of said materials.

The virus, or viruses, can also be easily spread when, for example, a healthy flower stem is cut with the same knife used to cut an infected stem, or when bulbs are plugged with virus-infected tissue. ... the appearance of current-season symptoms can be accelerated by inoculating plants soon after the leaves emerge, either by the sap transmission method or with virus-carrying aphids.

From the U. Illinois section of Integrated Pest Management, here.

TLDR: you'd want to carefully cut plugs of the infected donor bulb and insert them into similar-shaped holes on the victims recipients. Maybe seal with grafting wax. Sap injection seems tricky, and would necessitate having patient zero and the new-infectees green at the same time.
posted by SaltySalticid at 11:43 AM on October 17, 2019 [5 favorites]

Response by poster: A year ago at the grocery store there was a whole rack of tulips in little pots, all the tulips looked very normal except one of the pots had weird broken-looking tulips. So, I'm not certain that I have TBV-infected bulbs, but it seems likely.
posted by gregr at 11:45 AM on October 17, 2019 [1 favorite]

It seems much more likely that a bulb of a striped tulip made it into the bulbs of the non-stripey tulips than that this was a TBV infected bulb, considering the controls in place.
posted by fiercecupcake at 12:04 PM on October 17, 2019 [3 favorites]

Hey please tell me/us how this turns out! It is a pretty tulip and also interesting things can happen even if it is not a viral broken tulip :)
posted by SaltySalticid at 6:05 PM on October 24, 2019 [1 favorite]