Tulip farm, Celina Record

Pilot Point tulip field the only one of its kind in Texas Lisa Ferguson, lferguson@starlocalmedia.com Mar 4, 2016 If a trip to Holland to tiptoe through the country’s famed tulip fields is on your bucket list, you may want to skip it and head to Pilot Point instead. There you’ll find six acres of beautiful buds through which to traipse at Texas-Tulips, the state’s only pick-your-own tulip field. The flowers typically bloom from late February through mid-April. The field opened to the public for this year’s season late last week. By mid-morning on Feb. 26, the place was bustling with young mothers and children, photographers and other visitors – many of whom had learned about the pretty place through social media. After viewing photos of the field on Facebook, Christie Lay drove from Grapevine so that her toddler-aged daughter, Cate, could pick a few tulips. “Tulips are the first sign of spring, so we thought we’d come check it out,” Lay said as Cate and her grandmother, Debbie, plucked a couple of bright pink buds. Cora Koeman’s family opened Texas-Tulips last year after having spent nearly four decades in The Netherlands carefully cultivating and selling tulips and bulbs to wholesalers. The family decided to move its business to Pilot Point after visiting North Texas in 2012. “This doesn’t even exist in The Netherlands,” she said of the pick-your-own concept, noting that most of that nation’s picturesque tulip fields are owned by commercial cultivators. Texas-Tulips grows about 40 varieties of tulips annually. The company imports its bulbs from Holland each year and lets them rests for several months as part of a crucial 15-week “chilling period” before planting them with specialized machinery that the family also had brought over from Europe. Despite the fact that soil conditions here are generally favorable, growing tulips in Texas can be tricky because the climate is different than in The Netherlands, Koeman said. “Tulip bulbs need a chilling period, but in Texas you never know if it will be a warm winter or if it won’t be,” she said. Each bulb produces one tulip stem. Koeman estimated that the family planted about 500,000 bulbs to produce this year’s colorful crop. “It’s so pretty,” said Frisco resident Leigh Ann Cambern, who visited the field recently with her 3-year-old twins, Hudson and Harper. “It’s like a pumpkin patch with tulips.” Follow the Celina Record on Twitter @celinarecord.