SPACING EXPERIMENTS ON BULBS: PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICE

Currently-used planting densities for narcissus and tulip are considered in relation to the morphological peculiarities of the plants. Costs of planting material are high and bulb-growing land is expensive. It is essential therefore that optimum planting densities can be defined to maximise financial return. For narcissus, optimum densities can be described in terms of weight of bulbs planted per unit area. For tulip a method is described for deriving optimum planting densities if costs of planting material and land are known. Future developments are discussed.