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Tulips begin to sprout at Skagit Acres

By AVA RONNING, Skagit Valley Herald
Published: January 24, 2025, 7:41am

SKAGIT — Tulips are beginning to sprout at Skagit County’s newest tulip field.

Skagit Acres, which is closed for the winter, expects to reopen April 1 — for the start of the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival — or sooner.

When it does so, it will feature a 3-acre tulip field with about 30 varieties of tulips on its property south of Mount Vernon.

It will also offer a stand with bulbs and cut tulips, a beer and wine garden, a gift shop and a café for those who want to be near the tulips without buying a ticket for the field itself.

Skagit Acres General Manager Marisa Schwabe said one reason for opening the new tulip field was to free up some of the traffic associated with Tulip Town.

Both Tulip Town and Skagit Acres are owned by Spinach Bus Ventures.

When the Skagit Acres gift shop reopens, it will be filled with spring-themed gifts. The café is currently being redone to feature popular lunch foods at a lower cost than last year, and to be accessible to those whether they come for the tulips or not.

“(We’re designing Skagit Acres to be) an experience where you can have a nice lunch, enjoy a glass of wine, see the fields, do some shopping, and enjoy our local grown tulips cut here,” Schwabe said.

Steve Johnson, farm manager at Tulip Town, said, “We’re hoping to get back to how it was where a lot of the farmers stop by here and have lunch or where you can bring your kids, and it’s not going to be through-the-roof expensive.”

There will also be food trucks during tulip season, and classes that can be taken.

“We’re going to learn from this and accentuate what works and eliminate what doesn’t. That’s the beauty of this, that’s what agriculture is all about,” Johnson said.

Johnson’s family has been involved in agriculture since the 1880s. Schwabe spent about 15 years working in the corporate world, lost interest, and found that she enjoyed working with her hands, having a creative outlet and staying in the county.

Steve Johnson, farm manager at Tulip Town, shows the tulips starting to grow at Skagit Acres and details what’s coming up this tulip season.

“I’m a third-generation Anacortes (resident), my daughter’s the fourth. It’s allowed me to see what it takes to successfully build something from the ground up … working with other people that are just as passionate as I am about Skagit County and the farmland, and creating an experience that people travel from all over the world to see is super exciting,” Shwabe said.

The Tulip Festival and other forms of agritourism remain an important source of income, a draw to visitors, and a way of preserving farmland in the Skagit Valley, which is important to Spinach Bus Managing Partner Rachael Ward Sparwasser.

Leading up to the festival, Tulip Town and Skagit Acres will have information booths at the Flower and Garden show in Seattle in February.

“The main thing I’m excited for is just being part of the iconic spring in the valley. I feel like (the tulips) have become a pretty big part of the culture here” Schwabe said.

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