A tulip spends eleven months preparing for three weeks of colour. The moment those petals drop, the plant starts deciding whether it has enough stored energy to flower again next spring. What happens over the next six weeks matters more than anything you did in autumn.

Get it right and the same bulbs will come back, often slightly bigger and stronger. Get it wrong and you will be buying fresh bulbs every year. There is nothing wrong with treating tulips as annuals — plenty of gardeners do — but there is no point paying for it twice by accident.

Deadhead as soon as the petals drop

Take off the flower head, not the stem. Snap or snip just below the base of the flower, above the top leaves. That removes the swelling seed pod before it starts drawing on the bulb's reserves. The stem you leave behind is still green and still working, so let it be.

Timing is easy to judge: as soon as a flower looks tired — petals papery, colour fading, head flopping — it is ready to come off. On multi-headed varieties, work through them as each one finishes rather than waiting for the whole clump.

Species tulips are the exception. Tulipa tarda, T. batalinii and T. sprengeri will self-sow happily if you leave a few seed heads to ripen, and the seedlings are usually welcome. Leave those alone and deadhead only the bigger garden hybrids.

Water only if the soil is genuinely dry

In a border, tulips rarely need extra water after flowering. A normal British spring usually supplies enough, and the leaves will tell you if it does not — limp, grey-looking foliage on a dry day means give them a proper soak.

When you do water, water deeply and occasionally rather than little and often. A good soak once a week is far more use than a daily sprinkle, because it reaches the bulbs rather than the top inch of soil.

Pots are a different matter. Container compost dries out fast in May and June, so keep it lightly moist while the leaves are green. Once they start to yellow, ease off and then stop altogether. From midsummer onwards, tulip bulbs want dry conditions — a wet summer is the single biggest reason bulbs rot in heavy clay soils.

Feed for the bulb, not the leaves

Feeding matters most in the fortnight after flowering. Use a high-potash liquid feed — the same tomato feed you would give courgettes — diluted according to the packet, every ten to fourteen days until the foliage turns yellow. Two or three doses is plenty.

Avoid anything high in nitrogen. General-purpose feeds push soft leafy growth at exactly the moment you want the plant putting energy downwards into the bulb. If you lift your bulbs every year, feeding still helps them bulk up before they come out of the ground.

Leave the foliage completely alone

This is the part most people get wrong. Tulip leaves need at least six weeks of light after flowering. Ideally leave them until they are straw-coloured, papery and pull away from the bulb with a gentle tug, which in most UK gardens means late June or early July.

• Do not tie the leaves into knots or loops.
• Do not braid them, bend them over or fold them down.
• Do not cut them back while any green remains.
• Do not cover them with mulch before they have died down.

Every green day is a day of photosynthesis, and those sugars are what pays for next year's flowers. If the fading foliage looks untidy, hide it rather than remove it. Plant cosmos, nicotiana, dahlias or hardy geraniums in front, or grow tulips among perennials that will rise up and screen them by June.

Mark where the bulbs are, too. A short cane or a written note saves you spearing them with a fork in autumn.

Do you actually need to lift them?

Not always. Many tulips will flower again left in place, particularly in light, free-draining soil that dries out in summer. Darwin hybrids and Triumph tulips are among the more reliable returners; fancy parrots and fringed varieties often come back smaller and are best treated as one-season plants.

Lift them if your soil is heavy clay, if the site stays wet in summer, if they are growing in pots, or if flowering was disappointing this year. Lift when the foliage has fully died down — usually late June to mid-July — and before the bulbs start making new roots in early autumn.

Use a garden fork pushed in a good 15cm (6in) away from the stem, straight down, then lever upwards. Bulbs sit deeper than you expect, and pulling on the stem just snaps it off.

Drying and storing bulbs

1. Spread the bulbs in a single layer in trays in a cool, airy spot out of direct sun for one to two weeks, until the skins are dry and papery.
2. Brush off loose soil and peel away any tatty outer tunics, keeping the flat base plate intact. Throw out anything soft, mouldy, holed or light and hollow.
3. Store in paper bags or open trays, labelled with variety and colour. Avoid sealed plastic, which traps moisture.
4. Keep them cool, dark and dry — a shed, garage or spare room is ideal. Check monthly and remove any bulb showing blue-grey mould.
5. Replant in November, roughly three times the bulb's own depth, into fresh compost if they are going back into pots.

Keep stored bulbs away from ripening fruit, which gives off ethylene and can spoil them. A kitchen windowsill is too warm and too bright.

Tulips in containers

Treat pot-grown tulips as lifted bulbs every year. Once the foliage has died down, tip the whole contents out, dry and clean the bulbs, store them, and replant in fresh compost in autumn. Left in a pot through summer they will either bake or sit soggy, and neither ends well.

A short season, done properly

Deadhead promptly, water only when the soil is dry, feed with potash while leaves are green, and leave that foliage standing for six weeks or more. Lift and store bulbs only if your soil or your pots demand it, and replant in November. Do those few things and the same tulips will reward you again next spring — with a little less effort than last time.

Photo: Plato Terentev / Pexels