Planting a bulb to harvest a bulb seems like a fruitless cycle. Wikipedia explains:
Most commercial tulip cultivars are complex hybrids, and often sterile. Tulips can be propagated through bulb offsets,(a small, virtually complete daughter plant that has been naturally and asexually produced) seeds or micropropagation (rapidly multiplying stock plant material to produce a large number of progeny plants, using modern plant tissue culture methods). Offsets and tissue culturemethods are means of asexual propagation for producing genetic clones of the parent plant
Offsets require a year or more of growth before plants are large enough to flower. Tulips grown from seeds often need five to eight years before plants are of flowering size. Commercial growers usually harvest the tulip bulbs in late summer and grade them into sizes; bulbs large enough to flower are sorted and sold, while smaller bulbs are sorted into sizes and replanted for sale in the future.
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