Forcing Bulbs

Flowers In Winter

By starting in the fall, you can have lovely spring flowers indoors in the middle of winter. Growing bulbs indoors is easy and fun, and takes up very little space. Simulating a short winter is the idea. Make bulbs think it's winter by placing them in a refrigerator, a cool closet, or even in a foam cooler place on a patio or balcony. Simulating winter conditions will cause the bulbs to grow sturdy roots and start to sprout in preparation for spring.

Get The Right Dirt

Use any good commercial organic potting soil mix, or you can make your own soil to plant the bulbs in. It’s pretty simple to do.Use 2 parts peat moss, one part perlite, and one part sterilized potting soil. Mix these three things together well. That gives you a clean, porous, moisture retaining, nutrient filled potting soil.

Unsterilized soil from your outside garden because it may contain bacterial or fungal pathogens that could infect the plant roots, so it's better not to use it.

Pots For Planting

Once you have your soil prepared, choose the pot you want to use and place a few pieces of broken crockery over the drainage holes. This will prevent the soil from falling out of the hole during planting, and keep the hole from clogging up later.

First, fill the pot half-full of soil mix. Keep the pointed ends up when placing the bulbs in the container. Plant the bulbs as closely together as possible, without actually letting the bulbs touch. Fill the pot with soil mix, then water the bulbs thoroughly from the top or immerse in a tub of water. That will settle the soil around the bulbs.

It Takes Some Time Now

Snowdrops, daffodils and crocus all work well. You can use any early blooming bulb, however.  Many places carry good bulbs. For example, you can click here for Daffodils from Breck's, plus they have a lot of other beautiful flowering bulbs. It takes about 12 weeks to force these early bloomers. It will take longer for bulbs like tulips, generally about 16 weeks. Keeping bulbs in cold storage for longer times will produce taller flowers.

Not enough time in storage will result in smaller plants and sometimes flowers that start to grown then die.

Light For the Bulbs.

Check the pots now and then once it's close time for the bulbs to start blooming. Fine white roots coming out of the drainage holes, and/or shoots 2 or three inches above the soil, are signs to take the pots out of cold storage.

Once the bulbs have reached this stage, it's good to place them in indirect lighting for a while before moving them to direct sunlight. Be carefuly not to allow the soil to dry out.

It's good if you can first move bulbs to a fairly cool location if possible, such as an unheated entryway or closed off back bedroom, where the temperatures are in the ’50s, before moving them on to the heated areas of the house, and into more direct sunlight.

Don't Let The Bulbs Die - Use Them Outside.

Once the blooms die, cut their stems off if you wish to reuse the bulbs. The leaves gather nutrients for the bulbs next year's blooms, so be sure the foilage has plenty of sunlight to continue to grow.

Once the foliage has withered, don't pull the leaves off. Store the bulbs with leaves still intact. Place the pots of bulbs in a cool, dry place until they can be planted outside. It doesn't work well to try to force the bulbs to bloom inside a second time, as being forced to bloom weakens the bulb. Any bloom from a second go round would be small.

By planting the bulbs outside, they will return to their natural schedule and follow the seasons. Once a year, maybe two, have passed, they will be making a beautiful display of blooms at the appropriate time.