(Radio Iowa) – The weather plays a big factor in the timing of the tulip blooms for the annual Pella Tulip Festival. Spokesperson Billie Rhamy says conditions have been just right this year as they festival gets underway today (Thursday).”They’re beautiful actually, we have all the parks are just blooming with all the colors. It’s actually a lot of fun this year to see it all coming together,” Rhamy says. She says the plantings are staggered to ensure there’s always fresh color.

“Our city parks people do such a great job of making sure that there’s lots of different rounds of tulips. So if some are on the downhill sides, others are bursting with colors, and some are coming up. So they do such a nice job. There’s thousands of tulips,” she says. The forecast calls for good weather as the Tulip Festival opens and Rhamy says that will bring in a lot of people. “We highly encourage people to come on Thursday, if possible. And Friday, of course, Saturday gets a little busy,” Rhamy says, “so if you do choose to come on Saturday, come early, and be ready to be waiting in a few lines just because we get such a good turnout when it’s beautiful on a Saturday.” The have a special set of tulips that you can see.

“I think there’s about like 312 of that this variety, and we happen to get over half of them,” she says. “So those are in our, in our community and they’re really, really dark red that turns almost black, which is kind of a fun little difference for people around here.” The events are all back up to speed following the pandemic, including the daily parades. They includes lots of food, with Dutch letters and the baloney sandwiches.

“We even have things like we put that baloney on a stick, then that same thing except they turn it into a corndog I think they call it a Dutch corndog which is something fun for people to try,” Rhamy says. “They have burgers that also have the Bologna be on it too and you get get like a double-decker and a triple-decker. There’s all sorts of food everywhere.”

You can find the full schedule of events at www.pellatuliptime.com.