Indoor Blooms From Bulbs

The snow might fall on the outside, but you can have gorgeous flowers blooming on the inside if you start forcing bulbs in the fall. It’s a lot of fun to grow bulbs indoors. It’s easy to do and takes up very little space. Creating a simulated short winter does the trick. Potted bulbs placed in the refrigerator, in a cool closet, or in a foam cooler on a patio or balcony, will think that it’s winter. Simulating winter conditions will cause the bulbs to grow sturdy roots and start to sprout in preparation for spring.

Dirt Is The First Necessity

You can make your own potting soil, or use any commercial organic potting mix. It’s not a hard job.  Use 1 part sterilized potting soil, one part perlite, and 2 parts peat moss. Mix all these things together well. These ingredients will make a clean, porous, moisture retaining, nutrient filled potting soil.

It’s better not to use unsterilized soil from your outside garden because it may contain bacterial or fungal pathogens that could infect the plant roots.

Time For A Pot

Choose the pot you want to use after the soil is ready, and place a few pieces of broken crockery over the drainage holes. This keeps the soil from falling out while you’re planting the bulbs, and keeps the hole from clogging up later.

Begin by filling the pot half-full of soil mix. With the pointed ends up, place the bulbs in the container. Without actually letting the bulbs touch, plant the bulbs as closely together as possible. 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.

Time For The Dark Side

Early blooming bulbs like crocus, daffodils and snowdrops work well.  You can find these bulbs at many places.  Just as an example,click here for Daffodils from Breck’s, plus many other gorgeous flowering bulbs. It takes about 12 weeks to force these early bloomers. It takes more time for bulbs like tulips, generally about 16 weeks. The flowers will be taller if they are left in cold storage longer.

Too short a time in storage will result in smaller plants and sometimes flowers that start to grown then die.

Moving To The Light.

Check the pots now and then once it’s close time for the bulbs to start blooming. When you see fine white roots coming out of the drainage holes, and/or shoots that are 2 to 3 inches above the soil, it’s time to take the pots out of cold storage.

At this stage of development all bulbs should be placed in indirect lighting for a while before moving them to direct sunlight. Do not be allow the soil to dry out.

A gradual transition works best, so move the bulbs first into a location that is still fairly cool if possible, a fairly cool location if possible, such as an unheated entryway or closed off back bedroom, where the temperatures are in the ’50s. Then move them on into the heated areas of the house and into more direct sunlight.

Blooming Once, Blooming Once Again.

If you wish to reuse the bulbs, after blooms die, cut the flower stems off. Let the foliage have plenty of sunlight for continued growth. This will gather the nutrients the bulb needs to bloom next year.

Don’t pull the leaves off after the foliage withers. Leave the leaves on the bulbs and store them in their pots in a cool, dry place until they can be planted outside. Trying to make the bulbs bloom inside a second time doesn’t work well because the bulbs are weakened from being forced to bloom inside. Any bloom from forcing bulbs a second time would be small.

By putting the bulbs back in the garden, they can return to a natural schedule. Within a year or so they should once again produce beautiful blooms.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 at 4:37 pm and is filed under Leaves. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.